00:00:00 ◼ ► Alright, anyway, shall we... Oh, what are you cracking? Seltzer. Nothing interesting. Flavored seltzer. Fine then.
00:00:08 ◼ ► You know, we have to properly start the show by talking about something that is truly awesome and no, John, it is not follow-up, except it kind of is. It's the ATP store! Yay! I don't have a Bell/Merlin style, but we have the ATP store back in better than...well, it's just different, I don't know. It's back. It is back.
00:00:28 ◼ ► So we are selling some merchandise...moitrandising, moitrandising. We do not have flamethrowers, however, we do have enamel pins. We do have, and we'll go back to that in a second actually, the classic ATP logo t-shirt that you know and love. A brand new monochrome Pro Max t-shirt.
00:00:46 ◼ ► And then the also bordering on old enough to be called classic Rainbow Pro Max t-shirt, which was very popular last time around. So, running quickly through these, the enamel pins are excellent. I have several. They are great. And they've gotten better, except not really the pins. The backs have gotten better because by popular demand, we are now sending them along with locking backs. Marco, I do not have any of these locking backs yet. Would you mind telling us a little bit about this magical technology?
00:01:14 ◼ ► Yeah, it turns out, like those little, like, what were those little black squishy things that came on the last pins?
00:01:20 ◼ ► Yeah, sorry everyone, those sucked. They came off really easily. And so we investigated for the second run of pins, better locking pin backs, and my wonderful wife, Tiff Arment, discovered these wonderful locking pin backs on Amazon, and we asked Cotton Bureau to source them for our new batch.
00:01:38 ◼ ► And they basically have some little trick where you have to kind of like, they like hold on more tightly, and then you have to kind of like pull them in a certain deliberate way to make them release and come off. So it basically prevents the pin or significantly reduces the chances of the pin, like getting knocked from the inside of a bag maybe and then falling out the front.
00:01:56 ◼ ► Right. It's fantastic from everything I've heard. Again, I don't have any myself, but you should definitely check this out. And I won't mention because I'm selfish and I want all your money that you can also get a billion of these off Amazon for like no money. So we'll pretend that we don't know that and say, "You should just get another pin. Why not? It'll be great."
00:02:15 ◼ ► Well, they don't come with the pins if you get them on Amazon. I got my pins today actually, and the locking pin backs are basically identical to the ones on Amazon. Like I couldn't tell the difference between them. So if you have any kind of pins and you want to make sure they don't fall off, just buy, it's like, you know, you buy like nine bucks for like a giant bag of these pin backs.
00:02:31 ◼ ► And I think what happens is like the pins get pulled from the front. It's not like anything hits the back of them. They just get pulled from the front. And if you pull hard enough from the front of them, they'll slide out of the backs. But with locking ones, that's much, much harder to do. So buy some A2B pins and buy a giant bucket of pin backs to use for all your pins so they don't come off whatever you pin them to.
00:02:49 ◼ ► Yeah, but because we love you, we are including the locking backs on all future pin orders. You're welcome.
00:02:55 ◼ ► Yeah. And I've actually, I need some more of these pins myself because I'm going through a bit of a backpack odyssey again, but I don't know if this is the night for that, but it's, oh boy.
00:03:05 ◼ ► We can talk about that another time. But moving right along to reiterate, we have the classic t-shirt that is available in men's and women's styles. It is available in Tri-Blend or 100% cotton.
00:03:17 ◼ ► There is the standard tee and the premium tee, and this is the most popular of all of our t-shirts and it is lingering ever longer because it is that great.
00:03:27 ◼ ► Jon, would you like to tell us about the Monochrome Pro Max t-shirt, which is a brand new riff on the classic rainbow one?
00:03:36 ◼ ► Well, you're taking a lot of time for the store stuff. I had a very compact spiel ready, but now that was too late. I've already blown the allotted time budget for you.
00:03:48 ◼ ► The other thing you forgot to mention about the shirts is all the shirts that we're going to talk about are available in black and white, and like you said, they're available in multiple materials because some people love the Tri-Blend and some people love 100% cotton.
00:03:59 ◼ ► Now you can get whatever you want. You can get Tri-Blend, you can get 100% cotton. And also, as you mentioned, that premium tee thing, some people want a t-shirt that's going to last them as long as possible so they don't have to buy another one because these are expensive t-shirts.
00:04:11 ◼ ► We understand that, you know, podcast t-shirts are not what you should use as a staple of your wardrobe, but as a fun one-off thing, they're great.
00:04:18 ◼ ► So if you want to spend more, kind of like Apple, if you want to spend more to get an even beefier t-shirt or a t-shirt with better fit, we do offer that option. We realize, yes, they do cost a lot more.
00:04:28 ◼ ► That's why we're still offering the regular ones as well. Anyway, all shirts in black and white, all shirts Tri-Blend and 100% cotton, all shirts in regular and super premium.
00:04:37 ◼ ► The new design is kind of riffing on the old Pro Max design where it had the silhouettes of a selection of professional high-end Macintoshes.
00:04:48 ◼ ► Yeah, it's the same thing, but the design now is that they're basically more or less to scale and it's more like pencil line art than just silhouettes. And it's not rainbow colored, it's monochrome, so you can get that with light text on a black t-shirt or black text or black lines on a white t-shirt.
00:05:15 ◼ ► No, that's all right though. But anyway, the monochrome max, very nicely done. That was an update by our friends at Cotton Bureau.
00:05:21 ◼ ► And then, as mentioned, the rainbow Pro Max t-shirt, which is also great. A little inside baseball for the listeners.
00:05:27 ◼ ► I, since I kind of have no job anymore, spent a lot of time working on the text for the ATP.fm/store page.
00:05:40 ◼ ► I worked on the, not the header text actually, that was all John's work, but the little blurbs next to each of these pictures I worked on very hard.
00:05:46 ◼ ► And I was very proud of the work that I did and then I went back a few hours after I wrote it and sent it to John and Marco to look at.
00:05:53 ◼ ► And I noticed that John had made some additions and, or really, had added a little note to the page, which I thought was quite funny.
00:06:04 ◼ ► So, in summary, if you're working with John Siracusa, expect that edits will happen, no matter how hard you try. But that's how you get better.
00:06:20 ◼ ► But in any case, we would love it if you could, before the 15th of November, ladies and gentlemen, that is Thursday, not this coming Thursday, but next Thursday, before the evening ATP time, next Thursday, the 15th of November.
00:06:39 ◼ ► And these things make great holiday gifts, especially for the nerds in your life or the people in your life who are nerds. They just don't realize it yet.
00:06:50 ◼ ► For the beginning of follow up, I would like to call your attention to the wonderful Good News podcast, which featured Jeremy Burge in a recent episode.
00:06:58 ◼ ► The Good News podcast is five minutes or less, generally speaking, pretty much every weekday morning, and they talk about, guess what, good news.
00:07:04 ◼ ► And a friend of the show, Jeremy Burge, was on the show and he predicted a kerfuffle with regard to Square vs. Round Waffles, which we talked about a couple episodes back.
00:07:13 ◼ ► And so I thought that was quite funny because we released our episode like a couple of days after this episode was released.
00:07:20 ◼ ► And so he had predicted it even before we spoke about it, which I thought was quite amusing.
00:07:25 ◼ ► And he is in two episodes of that show, of the Good News podcast, and you should check them both out because Jeremy's awesome and so is the Good News podcast.
00:07:33 ◼ ► Moving on. Friend of the show, John Gruber, has eliminated all doubt and told us that the new Apple Pencil only works with new iPad Pros.
00:07:42 ◼ ► Additionally, the old Apple Pencil will only work on old iPad Pros and that 6th gen iPad weird thing that came out semi-recently.
00:07:54 ◼ ► I hadn't thought about that when they made the announcement. I'm a little bit surprised that they're so hard-line about it.
00:08:02 ◼ ► Because if you buy the new Pencil and you have an old iPad, how are you going to charge it?
00:08:06 ◼ ► Like, there's no place to plug it in. It doesn't have any kind of ports or plugs or anything. It's just got that flat side that they want you to shove up against the little flat charging thingy.
00:08:16 ◼ ► So I see how that's a problem. Now, I'm sure someone could come up with some sort of little thing that charges the new Pencil just from like a, you know, like some, I don't know, some flat thing that you put it against.
00:08:33 ◼ ► There's two problems. There's charging and pairing, right? And that's why, like, even if you could, like, even if you had an old Pencil and you wanted to use it on a new iPad, say, and you were willing to carry around like a lightning charger for it, that still wouldn't solve the issue of how the heck do you pair it to the new iPad, you know?
00:08:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm sure someone could figure something out, though. Like, certainly Apple could have figured something out. And I'm sure there's going to be accessories that you can buy from China or something that will do this.
00:09:02 ◼ ► But like, but yes, it's a very hard separation between the things. And, you know, going the other direction, so you have an old Pencil and you want to use it on a new thing.
00:09:09 ◼ ► Well, if you have an old Pencil already, probably you have something you can charge it with. But then, yeah, the pairing thing, I mean, presumably there's some kind of Bluetooth thing going on in the Pencil and Apple could have updated the software to find a way to make it pair, but they didn't.
00:09:22 ◼ ► So it is just basically a hard line. The old Rolly Pencil is the old world, the new flat sided Pencil in the new world. And in case you were wondering about that, don't think that you're going to...
00:09:32 ◼ ► I don't need to buy a Pencil because I've got an old one. It won't work with the new iPads.
00:09:35 ◼ ► All right. Moving right along. Something interesting came out recently with regard to laptops with T2 chips in them. It says all Mac portables with the Apple T2 security chip feature a hardware disconnect that ensures that the microphone is disabled whenever the lid is closed.
00:09:54 ◼ ► So this is something that is literally in hardware. And in fact, the paper continues, this disconnect is implemented in hardware alone and therefore prevents any software even with root or kernel privileges in Mac OS. And even the software on the T2 chip itself, from engaging the microphone lid is closed.
00:10:09 ◼ ► The camera is not disconnected in hardware because guess what? You can't see anything when the lid is closed. So that is pretty cool. I don't remember where we found that.
00:10:18 ◼ ► It's a PDF and Apple has this PDF on their website we'll put in the show that just tells you all about the T2. So this is coming straight from Apple. This is not speculation.
00:10:26 ◼ ► Of course, the whole thing about the camera not being disconnected because why would you need disconnected? You can't see anything when the lid is closed. That's the part where the 80s spy movie tells you that by noticing slight variances in light, you can reconstruct the image of the surrounding room even when the thing is closed.
00:10:40 ◼ ► Which is one of those ridiculous movie things you would see. But I remember seeing a demo of an MIT thing at one point where they were using scattered ambient light to essentially see around corners to be able to see what card was completely out of view of a camera.
00:10:55 ◼ ► It was mind boggling and terrifying. So I bet you could pull something like this off in a movie and people would accept it. But anyway, the hardware disconnect, that's something I'd love to see iFixit figure out. Because the way they make it sound, it's like two metal things that are pulled apart from each other.
00:11:14 ◼ ► I suppose the 80s hacker movie way to do it would be to overdrive the circuit to cause an arc to connect the thing to hook up the switch. It also wouldn't work. But anyway, they're essentially moving two pieces of metal far away from each other when the lid is closed because there's a hinge going on there.
00:11:31 ◼ ► So there's nothing you can do in software to bridge that gap to turn the microphone back on. This is to prevent someone from hacking your laptop and you close the lid and you think everything's fine and it's closed the lid but really it's there listening and sending all of your audio to this nefarious person who's spying on you.
00:11:46 ◼ ► Apple bragging about their increased security and their T2 supporting Macs. And all of this is going towards, I'm sure we'll talk about this in the future, this is something Apple has said themselves and the drumbeat will continue as they go on with the T3 and all the other things.
00:12:05 ◼ ► They want to make Macs like iPhones. We've talked many times in the past and there's an old adage in the computer world that physical access trumps all security. So if you have access to someone's PC as in you're sitting in front of it, you're physically there with it,
00:12:21 ◼ ► there's nothing security wise that can be done in that computer to stop you from getting into it because there's so many different ways to get into a PC despite any kind of encryption or anything like that, especially if the PC is running all the way down to those ones that freeze the thing.
00:12:36 ◼ ► So they freeze the state of all the RAM chips, literally like with cold stuff, freeze the RAM, and then extract your encryption keys because they're in memory somewhere when your computer is on. All sorts of things like that. Security is great, it's great for preventing remote exploits of people attacking your computer over the network and all sorts of firewalls and all sorts of things to prevent privilege escalation.
00:13:00 ◼ ► If you connect to the computer somehow, you can escalate your privileges, but physical, if you're in there in the room with it or if some nefarious person steals your computer and they have it in their laboratory and they're physically with it, there's nothing you can do to stop them.
00:13:14 ◼ ► And as we know from phones, that has not really been the case for a long time with phones in that the goal is, even if someone nefarious has your phone, that it's very difficult or impossible, the goal for it to be impossible, to get into that phone.
00:13:29 ◼ ► And there are all sorts of exploits that have made this not true for phones, but every time one of those exploits is found, Apple closes it in the next phone and so on and so forth, so it gets harder and harder.
00:13:41 ◼ ► The whole goal of the T-chip architecture for Macs is to make Macs like phones, where there is no longer a blanket expectation that if you have physical access to a Mac, you can get into it.
00:13:51 ◼ ► You want to make it more like phones, where you might not be able to get into it, and the goal is you're not supposed to be able to get into it, and any time you can get into a Mac because you have physical access, Apple goes back to the drawing board and finds a way to close that hole and produces something better.
00:14:04 ◼ ► So the Macs aren't there yet, but that's the goal, and it'll be pretty neat when they get there, despite the fact that it will make dual booting and doing what we want with our computers and all sorts of other stuff much, much harder, but that's just the world we live in, and I think it's probably the right move, and I just hope they can preserve as much of the cool, hackery fun things you can do with computers while they make things more secure for regular people.
00:14:27 ◼ ► It's a fine line to walk, but I think they can do it. And then finally, in follow-up, ATP FM, our website, is now dark mode enabled, thanks to a friend of the show, Spencer Rollers, who basically gave me a bunch of CSS to dump in Squarespace, and that's what I did. Hooray!
00:14:41 ◼ ► So if you happen to have Purple Safari and you're on Mojave and would like to check that out, please feel free. If you have bug reports, I guess send them to me and I might get to them one day.
00:14:52 ◼ ► See? You touch it, it becomes your problem. Yeah, I know. This is what I do, though. I do it for you guys, so you don't have to.
00:14:58 ◼ ► No one goes to the ATP website, so it doesn't matter, but everyone's going to go there because they're going to go to ATP.fm/store, right? And then they'll see the ATP website, and if you're running Mojave and you have dark mode enabled and you're running Safari Technology Preview,
00:15:09 ◼ ► known as Purple Safari, then yes, you too will see dark mode, which is exactly like light mode, except basically reversed. It's not very exciting. It's not a very exciting website.
00:15:22 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Hover. Visit hover.com/ATP to learn more and get 10% off your first purchase. Get a domain name for whatever you're passionate about.
00:15:30 ◼ ► Hover is an awesome place to buy and manage domain names. I'll tell you what, these days you want your own name to just manage your own identity.
00:15:38 ◼ ► Wherever you have your identity, whether it's your email address or the website URL you give people, it says something about you, good or bad.
00:15:45 ◼ ► If you have some kind of massive web host behind your name and what you're giving people, that comes with a certain degree of baggage, because what if that company is falling out of favor?
00:15:55 ◼ ► Or what if it's no longer cool? Or what if it has political problems, right? And it also just kind of shows you're not established very well, or you're not really saying something with who you are.
00:16:05 ◼ ► Hover can change that for you by giving you a domain name. Your email address can be your name at whatever you want. Your website can be whatever you want, .com or .info or .plumbing or .design, whatever it is.
00:16:17 ◼ ► You can have a name that you own and you control. And Hover is just a wonderful place to do that. There's lots of places you can get domain names online. I've tried a lot of them myself, and I manage most of my domains at Hover for a reason.
00:16:27 ◼ ► Because Hover is just really good. They're pleasant, they don't try to upsell you or scam you. They give you privacy by default. Their control panel is super nice, and they have wonderful support if you ever need it.
00:16:38 ◼ ► Although I bet you won't, because they're just really easy to use and it's really nice. But I highly suggest, once again, check out Hover for a domain name. You can control your own identity, control the branding that you're showing the world.
00:16:48 ◼ ► It really makes you look better when you have your own domain name. So visit Hover.com/ATP to learn more and get 10% off your first purchase. Hover, get a domain name for whatever you're passionate about.
00:17:00 ◼ ► We have had a busy week. I had a very busy week, as did Marco, last week when we kind of turned our worlds upside down in order to go to Brooklyn on a whim, if you will. But Marco, you really missed the city a lot, and you decided to go back, if I understand things correctly. So tell me about this.
00:17:23 ◼ ► To make a long story short, I'm sitting here with a 12.9 inch iPad review unit and pencil and keyboard. By the way, some quick real-time follow-up. I realized right after we finished the last segment about connecting the old pencil, that there is indeed a way to do it with all Apple gear.
00:17:40 ◼ ► You can plug, using a USB-C to lightning cable, you can plug the C end into the iPad, the lightning end into the kind of gender changer adapter for the pencil that lets you plug an iPad plug into it to charge it.
00:17:55 ◼ ► So I had C to lightning to flippy dongle thing to pencil. And so I plugged it all in to see if it would pair, and it wouldn't. So there is a way indeed to plug the old pencil into the new iPad very indirectly, but it doesn't do anything.
00:18:11 ◼ ► Anyway, so I was able to ask some questions of some wonderful Apple people who very generously gave me some time. I asked a whole bunch of nerdy questions. And I don't really, this was literally a few hours ago, and so I have not had a lot of time to formulate my own impressions of this device, with a few exceptions.
00:18:34 ◼ ► But for the most part, I haven't had that much time. All the official press reviews all hit this morning as we record, so if you want a review from somebody who's been using it for more than a couple hours, I would suggest going to those.
00:18:48 ◼ ► And maybe next week, after I have had more time with it, I will have more to say. But for now, I don't know, what do you guys want to know? You had some pretty good questions earlier. What do you want to know?
00:19:08 ◼ ► And so to put this in context, too, I've had a couple of fortunate occasions in the past where I've gotten the chance to ask Apple people questions. And you have to understand, and you see this a lot in the reactions whenever a grouper has an exec on the talk show, you have to understand that Apple people are not going to tell you all their secrets. They're not going to tell you about future products. They're not going to say anything that makes the company or their products look bad.
00:19:34 ◼ ► So certain questions aren't even worth asking. These all have limited time. When a grouper's on the talk show with an executive, he has, what, 45 minutes maybe at most? The press briefings are 20 minutes to a half hour at most. There's not a lot of time to ask questions that you don't think you're going to get a useful answer on.
00:19:54 ◼ ► I did ask a few of them anyway. I didn't get a lot of solid ground on things like price increases and everything. I did find out, though, about the headphone jack removal on the iPad Pro that basically literally just doesn't fit.
00:20:10 ◼ ► The main issue with the iPad Pro is the thickness. And while the headphone jack would indeed probably still fit on the outer edge, it would have to protrude into the case, into where the screen area is. And it doesn't fit behind the screen. That's the main problem with that.
00:20:29 ◼ ► I'm actually kind of surprised that USB-C ports even fit. But I think the answer of why the new iPad bezel is exactly the size that it is is probably that the USB-C port just barely fits. And I bet if you look at the teardown that iFixit will probably publish sometime in the next 24 hours or so, I would guess that there's very little clearance between the USB-C port and the screen behind it.
00:20:55 ◼ ► That's something that people pointed out after last week's show. We were talking about USB-C on the phone. And I think you, Marco, mentioned that lightning still has an advantage because it's thinner. But many people pointed out that the new iPads are thinner than any of the current iPhones. In fact, thinner, I think, than any iPhone ever made.
00:21:15 ◼ ► And yet it has USB-C on it. I think the argument for the phone, though, was always not that you couldn't fit USB-C on any of the phones, but that ideally Apple would still continue to like to make the phone thinner.
00:21:29 ◼ ► Just because thinner would mean lighter, thinner means more room for a case, thinner means more room for a larger battery case, and just the naked robotic core, that there's room to make it thinner. And if you could get the iPhone X but have it half the thickness and then put a chunky case on it or something, it would be a better, lighter phone than the current one.
00:21:47 ◼ ► Obviously setting aside, obviously, battery life and all the reasons why it's not thinner. But I'm saying all the things being equal. If you could find a way to keep the battery life but also make it thinner, it would be good.
00:21:55 ◼ ► On the other hand, I feel like making the iPad half the thickness of the current one, you start to run into issues with like, now it has to be like a bendy material, because it's so large and you get so much leverage.
00:22:07 ◼ ► If you have any kind of fulcrum, like in the center, like your knee or something, if it really is half the thickness or, you know, it has to be bendy at certain points. Same thing with the phones.
00:22:15 ◼ ► I mean, at a certain point, if you make your phone too thin, it has to be bendy. But we're not at bendy materials yet. So I feel like the phone can get thinner easier than the iPad, because you have less leverage to bend a phone.
00:22:25 ◼ ► Although, you know, talk about the iPhone 6. We've already seen, depending on what the phone is made out of, and if it doesn't have enough springback, you can bend it already.
00:22:33 ◼ ► But lightning on the phone gives Apple the ability to make the phone even thinner than the current iPad, which would be advantageous for the phone, again, assuming you could fit the battery in, assuming it can be springy or whatever.
00:22:46 ◼ ► But perhaps not advantageous to the iPad because the challenges are so much greater. Probably someone in the way that Force Touch isn't on the iPads, because just, you know, the physical reality is of having a larger surface area to figure out where to put all the force sensors and bending and all the other stuff.
00:23:02 ◼ ► Anyway, all this is to say that, yeah, the headphone thing, that's interesting information that they couldn't get it to fit, but USB-C, barely fitting, makes total sense to me, especially since it's a, you know, it's a computer standard, and it is a flat thing instead of a round cylindrical thing.
00:23:21 ◼ ► But when you said that, like, oh, the headphone jack won't fit, I immediately thought of our friend, the, someone will tell me the exact name of this, the little skinnier headphone jack, what is that called? The 1.8 millimeter thing?
00:23:40 ◼ ► What a troll that would be to put that thing on there, because nobody has anything that plugs into that. It'd be like, oh, look at this headphone jack, and you'd go to plug in your headphones, and be like, wait, why is this not, is this a joke? Why is this headphone so tiny?
00:23:59 ◼ ► Oh, David Shaw and the chat got it right. It's 2.5 millimeter, and the other ones are 3.5, so it's not, it isn't half the size, but it's smaller.
00:24:05 ◼ ► Yeah, well, that would have been great. I mean, actually, it sounds silly, like, we would make fun of them mercilessly if they had a headphone dongle instead of no headphone, but I think it would actually solve the low latency, cheap audio problem that people are complaining about.
00:24:19 ◼ ► Like, they want to be able to edit audio without the latency of a Bluetooth headphone, and you'd want to be able to keep your thing plugged in while you did that. Anyway, that makes sense. I mostly buy that.
00:24:31 ◼ ► I think I would prefer the iPad to be thin and not fit the headphone jack, so I think they made the right call in terms of that tradeoff. It's kind of surprising that they didn't mention that in the keynote.
00:24:40 ◼ ► Like, it's such an explicable, easily testable reason that makes sense, and would, like, but to save that for briefings instead of just tell us on stage, "It's so thin, we couldn't even fit a headphone," I don't know, maybe they didn't have a good way to sell, and they figured, "Let's just not mention it at all."
00:24:57 ◼ ► But I still feel like it's going to be somewhat disappointing to people, but it also sounds like it's not coming back, because if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit.
00:25:04 ◼ ► The only way they could get it to come back is if they switched to OLED, where the screen will be thinner, kind of like the iPhone X versus the iPhone XR, or XS versus the XR, where the OLEDs apparently are thinner than LCDs because you don't have the backlight assembly.
00:25:23 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, I mean, and so, yeah, I got a number of good tidbits about this kind of stuff, so like, and I think, honestly, I don't think it's coming back no matter what technology does, because like, I think once Apple is done with the port, like, they're not going to bring it back.
00:25:40 ◼ ► So wait until the USB-A comes roaring back to the laptops. Keep hope alive. Or maybe SD.
00:25:48 ◼ ► Well, we don't. We've got to wait for the new design philosophy. There could be an SD card slot. I'm still holding out hope. SD card could come back.
00:25:54 ◼ ► And actually, I've been thinking more about MagSafe, just because it annoys me more and more to think about using a Thunderbolt 3 port to power something, like plugging a power adapter into it, and the only thing that incredibly high bandwidth, incredibly capable port is already supplying power, and it's like a total waste.
00:26:11 ◼ ► Put a MagSafe on it, and then let people still run their laptops through USB-C, like don't make those ports stop working for that purpose, but also have MagSafe.
00:26:21 ◼ ► So if people want, they can use MagSafe for power, leaving all their other ports available for port stuff.
00:26:26 ◼ ► But if they don't want and just want to bring one charger with them, you can also charge it from USB-C. This is my current Mac laptop fantasy that I'm... Anyway, sorry to interrupt.
00:26:34 ◼ ► So anyway, I did ask about OLED, because one question obviously is you have these phones that have OLED now for two years. Why not OLED on the iPad? Is it just not ready yet or anything?
00:26:49 ◼ ► And of course, Apple people are never going to say something is not ready yet, because that implies a future direction.
00:26:56 ◼ ► So again, you gotta take what you can get with the way they answer stuff, because just knowing how they work, they're never going to transmit future intentions, because they know that can bite them in the butt, and so they're cautious.
00:27:09 ◼ ► But basically the impression I got about OLED is that the OLED tech simply isn't there yet for panels of the right size and properties that would go on an iPad, that they're basically just not good enough yet.
00:27:25 ◼ ► In areas like off-axis viewing and color and everything else. So my interpretation of the answer is that might be coming down the road, but not imminently.
00:27:37 ◼ ► And that makes sense, because think about OLED panels and where they're made. We all know they've been made in phones for a long time. Apple is kind of late to this party, but phones are all of a similar size. They're not too giant.
00:27:49 ◼ ► And then they're also made for television sets, but the television set ones, as thin as they are, are massively thicker than any screen that has to fit inside a 5.9mm iPad.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Yeah, and they have way fewer pixels in them. So there's the two ends of the spectrum. There's phone size, very high density, very, very thin, and there's television size, comparatively, monstrously low density, gigantic, but way too thick.
00:28:13 ◼ ► And so I think they have to meet in the middle there where they can finally make something that is very high density, but also like the size of an iPad.
00:28:23 ◼ ► Which would be a huge number of pixels. I don't know if an OLED screen has ever been made with that many pixels. I don't do the math on how many pixels are actually on the big iPad at retina resolution. What are the native pixels?
00:28:36 ◼ ► That said, I would love one, and I'm sure if they get there they will use it because that's clearly the direction they're going, but it doesn't surprise me that they're not quite there yet.
00:28:43 ◼ ► I think also keep in mind, and this is not anything they said, but keep in mind that when you look at the way the phones went OLED, they had to go to 3x. Like 2x isn't enough.
00:28:54 ◼ ► They had to go to 3x, I think partly because of the way that OLED doesn't really have all the sub pixels. Like if you look at the little sub pixel pattern of how OLED screens represent the different red, green, and blue.
00:29:05 ◼ ► That's not all OLEDs, that's just what they chose to do with their panels. Pentile or whatever, which is gross if you see how it's done.
00:29:12 ◼ ► Right, and there's a bunch of different arrangements and everything, but basically every pixel doesn't have red, green, and blue. Basically every pixel has any two of those. They all have green and then they kind of alternate red and blue.
00:29:23 ◼ ► Maybe they went 3x on the phones to try to alleviate some of the problems that came along with having those not really all their sub pixels. So maybe they would have to go 3x on the iPad to get acceptable quality.
00:29:39 ◼ ► And that would of course make it even harder, because that's an even bigger, and also I think price could become a problem at that point. Again, this is nothing they said, but the phone sells for more than what the iPad sells for.
00:29:52 ◼ ► But the iPad has almost all of the same hardware as the phone. So you basically have a larger panel and a few other extra things like the bigger GPU and everything.
00:30:02 ◼ ► And yeah the phone has more cost in the cameras maybe, but like the iPad has some pretty major costs that the phone doesn't have or has smaller ones of, but sells for less money.
00:30:13 ◼ ► So I would imagine there's also an economic issue there of you probably can't put an extremely cutting edge OLED 3x panel and get enough of them to supply all the iPad Pros necessarily in 2018.
00:30:27 ◼ ► So anyway, I had a bunch of other miscellany that I asked before I got into some of the good stuff. I did ask because I was so concerned about my fingerprint pad from my 10.5 Fingerpad Pro that's just covered in smeary, greasy fingerprints all the time.
00:30:42 ◼ ► I asked if there was any change to the oleophobic coating. No, there isn't. So that's unfortunate. It's the same oleophobic coating as before.
00:30:51 ◼ ► The anti-reflective coating got better, but that's actually under the oleophobic coating so that's not going to probably have any effect here.
00:30:57 ◼ ► So unfortunately the new one is going to be probably just as fingerprinty as the old one and that's a shame.
00:31:03 ◼ ► The rear camera, there's been a lot of questions about what the rear camera is. Is it the XR camera? Why is it different in certain specs? And the answer basically is that it's a whole new camera, but it's roughly comparable in most major ways to the one that's in the XS and XR.
00:31:19 ◼ ► So it supports Smart HDR. It does not support portrait mode. And just impression wise, it's freaking huge. The camera looks massive. It actually looks kind of cool.
00:31:29 ◼ ► So I think it looks like it's a pretty awesome camera. I know that people are down on iPad cameras who are nerds, but I would say that's a short-sighted view and you're missing out.
00:31:39 ◼ ► Like I actually use the iPad camera. I don't carry it around the world and hold it up to landmarks, but I use it around the house. I use it like, you know, I'll take pictures of my breakfast and send it to Mike.
00:31:51 ◼ ► I will do a lot of things with the iPad camera. You're just going to let that go and not explain it? Yeah. Or a lot of apps will use it in useful ways, besides AR demos, which I don't care about.
00:32:02 ◼ ► Even stuff like the eBay app. If you're selling something on eBay, it's actually way easier to do it on an iPad than it is on a desktop browser because it integrates the photo taking right with it.
00:32:13 ◼ ► And so you can just like snap a few pictures of the thing you're selling and just post it right there and have it all be done. There's uses like that. The iPad benefits from its camera.
00:32:23 ◼ ► So anyway, it is a good camera. It is not exactly the same as the other ones, but it seems like it's close enough.
00:32:31 ◼ ► I asked also, you know, the iPad is seemingly, it's marketed seemingly as a portrait device. You know, like the logo on the back faces a certain way.
00:32:44 ◼ ► The logo on the back only looks right when you're in portrait. Yet the way that I use it is in a keyboard case and the way a lot of people use it is in landscape, like a keyboard case.
00:32:53 ◼ ► I asked like, you know, if there was something behind that. And I think I provoked some thought. It didn't seem like a lot of people asked that.
00:33:02 ◼ ► There were a number of responses to my questions that indicated that not a lot of people asked the kind of things I was asking.
00:33:08 ◼ ► But, you know, I think a lot of it was just like legacy. Like, you know, it was always designed that way.
00:33:14 ◼ ► And also it matters less and less. Like, because now, since there's no more home button, the like official orientation of the device in hardware matters less.
00:33:26 ◼ ► Because you see it less. Like when it's in landscape, you don't have this big circle on the side where the home button is.
00:33:33 ◼ ► Like, you do still have certain things that are, you know, not on all four sides. Like you still have the positioning of the sleep/wake button, the volume buttons, and the face ID camera being like, you know,
00:33:42 ◼ ► significant things that are only in one spot. But otherwise, the only time you would notice that your iPad is in like the wrong orientation, if you have a keyboard case connected to it, is if it boots.
00:33:54 ◼ ► And you see the Apple boot logo. But you don't reboot your iPad that much. And now even the keyboard case covers up the back.
00:34:00 ◼ ► So you don't see the Apple logo on the back being sideways either. So that was interesting, I thought.
00:34:06 ◼ ► I asked a lot about the smart connector. The original smart connector for the first iPad Pro, so for any listeners who aren't following along, that's the little three dots that the keyboard plugs into.
00:34:16 ◼ ► And Apple advertised it as a thing, and it was positioned as the kind of thing that like other people can make accessories for it besides Apple.
00:34:25 ◼ ► And in the, what, three years since the iPad Pro has existed? Has it been about that long?
00:34:30 ◼ ► So in like the three-ish years that the iPad Pro has existed, I think only two non-Apple smart connector things have ever been made.
00:34:38 ◼ ► They were both by Logitech, I think. One was a really weird keyboard that nobody liked, and one was the slowest charging dock in the world.
00:34:46 ◼ ► And so I asked about this, and, you know, because now the new iPad Pro still has a smart connector, but now it's in a different spot, and only Apple's keyboard uses it.
00:34:57 ◼ ► Basically, the gist I got is that this could theoretically be used for other things, but that it's still really pretty much only designed for keyboards.
00:35:14 ◼ ► For anything more than that, they expect people to be using USB-C instead, and that makes sense.
00:35:19 ◼ ► I asked about backlit keys and whether the smart connector would be able to provide enough power for backlit keys.
00:35:26 ◼ ► Basically, the answer I got on that was like, you know, they try to make this thing as thin-lined as possible.
00:35:31 ◼ ► And I get that, like, even though I want backlit keys, I also am a user of this thing, and when the keyboard is on the iPad, it does get pretty bulky.
00:35:49 ◼ ► And Apple knows as well as I do that there are aftermarket options of fancier keyboard cases that have backlighting and maybe aluminum and stuff like that.
00:35:58 ◼ ► And so that can cover it somewhat. I did ask, like, is there an MFI program or something?
00:36:06 ◼ ► Like, are there going to be third-party smart connector things? And the general answer I got was pretty much no.
00:36:13 ◼ ► Or at least, like, it hasn't happened yet. It didn't seem like they were closing the door to that, but it seemed like there certainly aren't any on the horizon.
00:36:22 ◼ ► So I'm guessing that's going to stay that way, because if you're a device manufacturer, why would you make something for the smart connector when you could make something for USB or Bluetooth and have it serve everything?
00:36:31 ◼ ► If Apple wants a thin-and-light solution to backlit keys, I have a suggestion for them.
00:36:48 ◼ ► Oh, I know what you're talking about. The thing where it's like a light capacitor, if you will, so it'll like...
00:36:56 ◼ ► I was going to reference this, but I realized maybe you two didn't have this in your childhood.
00:37:00 ◼ ► When I was a kid, glow-in-the-dark was big. Lots of kids' toys were glow-in-the-dark in some fashion.
00:37:07 ◼ ► I guess it was maybe in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, or whenever it was invented it was a big thing. Maybe by the time you were kids it wasn't that big of a deal.
00:37:15 ◼ ► Anyway, this technology still exists. Most often you used to have little stickers of stars that you put on your bedroom wall or ceiling in your child's bedroom.
00:37:26 ◼ ► Yeah, well, the watches have radium, which I don't think was a great suggestion for a keyboard.
00:37:32 ◼ ► I know, but that wouldn't be a good suggestion for keys. But glow-in-the-dark is still a thing.
00:37:38 ◼ ► Look in the trunk of all of your cars and there's probably a little tiny handle that government mandates be in there so you can get out if you're ever trapped in your trunk.
00:37:45 ◼ ► And chances are, because car manufacturers want to save money and wait, they just make it glow-in-the-dark instead of putting a light.
00:37:50 ◼ ► Because I think there's some government requirement that you have to be able to find it.
00:37:53 ◼ ► What else did I see that was glow-in-the-dark? There was something else that I saw recently that was like a modern thing that had a plastic glow-in-the-dark part.
00:37:59 ◼ ► Anyway, if they made the little white parts of the keycaps out of the magic glow-in-the-dark material that sort of charges up with sunlight during the day, and then when it's dark, glows in the dark, they could do that.
00:38:10 ◼ ► But it would look incredibly cheap and it would look like it was a toy from the 70s, but it would work and it would not add weight.
00:38:21 ◼ ► Yeah, the entire watch world figured this out too. It's called Lume Paint and it's very, very widely used.
00:38:26 ◼ ► Or you can use, I believe, tritium gas tubes, which is what ball watches use that kind of always softly glow, although I can't imagine Apple going for that.
00:38:42 ◼ ► What else did I ask? Oh, why does the iPhone aggressively pursue water resistance but the iPad doesn't?
00:38:54 ◼ ► I asked too, had there been maybe any advances in water resistance that we just haven't been talked about?
00:39:05 ◼ ► And yeah, the answer I basically got is I'm the first person to ever ask that question.
00:39:11 ◼ ► Oh, come on. That's just, they have to, I have a better answer. The answer for them is, I don't know, the answer is that it's more like a computer or a laptop and you wouldn't stick your Mac underwater and therefore it's not a concern.
00:39:21 ◼ ► I mean, the real answer as we've talked before is I've, and Casey I'm sure has argued, for Mac laptops to be more water resistant.
00:39:28 ◼ ► Like, I would say, oh, well it's more like a laptop so it doesn't have to be. No, no, you're taking the wrong idea from that.
00:39:34 ◼ ► In fact, iPads should be waterproof and laptops should be way more water resistant than they are because we all live in the world where we have drinks and there are computers and there are iPads and there are phones.
00:39:46 ◼ ► Yes, maybe you're less likely to drop your iPad off the edge of a boat into the water than you are your phone.
00:39:52 ◼ ► But who knows? Like people are, to Marcus' point earlier, take pictures with their iPads and stuff like that.
00:39:56 ◼ ► There's really no reason Apple shouldn't make all the iPads just as waterproof as the phone other than the fact that they just don't consider it an important thing to do.
00:40:06 ◼ ► I think it's super important and I think everybody with kids and iPads feels the same way.
00:40:11 ◼ ► Yeah, and the reason I ask is like, I would want that, you know, like even though I don't frequently need to use my iPad out in the rain, I would like the option to if it comes up and that's something that computers mostly can't do, right?
00:40:23 ◼ ► And so like at least, you know, the, like you can do it with your iPhone and your Apple Watch, that's great.
00:40:29 ◼ ► It would be awesome if the iPad could be like your, your any conditions computer and you wouldn't have to worry about that.
00:40:35 ◼ ► In practice, I don't think I've ever heard of anybody liquid damaging an iPad, but I'm sure somebody like Casey could figure it out.
00:40:40 ◼ ► Oh, I'm sure he could have. Here's the thing, if any iPad is easy to waterproof, it's the one with only one remaining port.
00:40:49 ◼ ► I know, but like, but I feel like the watch has solved that problem. Sealed speaker chambers that expel water and all the other jazz.
00:40:56 ◼ ► Like the watch is much more complicated to waterproof than the current iPad, the iPad Pro rather, because it's literally just got one hole in it.
00:41:02 ◼ ► That's all. And then the speaker grills. But again, you seal off the speaker chambers just like they are on the watch and deal with the one USB-C port.
00:41:10 ◼ ► Like the thing practically looks like is waterproof now. Not that I think anyone should go into this, but look at it.
00:41:14 ◼ ► Like, do you see any place where water can get in besides the speaker holes in USB-C? Are there creases? Are there gaps?
00:41:21 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know. I have a feeling it would be hard to make the speakers be good and waterproof.
00:41:26 ◼ ► Like the speaker on the watch doesn't need to be good. It just needs to be like a barely bare, you know.
00:41:29 ◼ ► They made the speaker on the watch louder. Anyway, I feel like this is within Apple's grasp and it would be a useful thing to do.
00:41:35 ◼ ► And in terms of water resistance, you know, like maybe it is. Like if you spill a drink on top of your iPad and the water just sort of runs off the edges, does it like, does capillary action suck it into the speaker holes?
00:41:47 ◼ ► Or does it just, you know, you just wipe it off with a paper towel and you're fine. Like, it might be more water resistant than we think, but the fact that Apple does not tell you that it's waterproof and baseless, please do not use your iPad in the back.
00:41:58 ◼ ► Do not drop your iPad into the water. Do not use your iPad in the rain. It makes me think that it is vulnerable in ways that it doesn't need to be. So, Apple, if you're listening, please make waterproof iPads.
00:42:11 ◼ ► Well, I mean, like it took Amazon a long time to even make a waterproof Kindle. And that's one where like a lot of people like to read on the beach or on the bath.
00:42:18 ◼ ► And like it took, so like there's clear demand for that and it took them a long time for even a simple device. So maybe there's something too like, you know, larger devices being harder.
00:42:27 ◼ ► Well, and the Kindle doesn't cost $2,000. So, please make my $2,000 iPad waterproof. It's more important than my $99 Kindle.
00:42:36 ◼ ► Yeah, fair point. I did ask John one of your pet questions. I asked basically, is there anything that we are losing by leaving the Lightning ecosystem and going to USB-C? Like the example that you cited, which is that the USB-C charging cables are like thicker and bulkier and less flexible than the Lightning ones, or than the USB-A ones in the Lightning world.
00:43:02 ◼ ► Like the USB-C Lightning cables are like much thicker and the connector is bigger and everything else as you described last time.
00:43:17 ◼ ► I want to see if they have the same thing. Because you got to answer it in an innocent way. Like, because they can just say, no, we're not losing anything. Then you pull out the, well, what about the thinner cables? But I would love to see if they came up with that and they probably wouldn't have. It's not going to tell you anything bad.
00:43:28 ◼ ► I'll tell you what though. So I have the one meter cable. So like, it's basically the same specs wise as the power cable that goes from the USB-C brick to MacBook Pros for the last two years.
00:43:42 ◼ ► So it's a USB 2.0 data only. It's not really meant for high speed data. 2.0 data only. And you know, typical white C to C cable.
00:43:50 ◼ ► But it feels like it's thinner and more flexible than the two meter one that comes with like, so I don't know if they just didn't need as much stuff inside to make a shorter one. But it does feel better. It's not quite as flexible as an old lightning one is like a USB-A lightning one. But it's really close. I would say it's close enough. So that might not be an issue anymore.
00:44:18 ◼ ► Do you remember the, I think it was lightning cables, in the beginning had longer stiff plastic sections and they shortened it up at some point? Am I crazy for remembering that?
00:44:29 ◼ ► I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. That was a while ago. Anyway, and I also asked like, you know, why go to USB-C at all and why do it now?
00:44:39 ◼ ► And the answer I got was very interesting. Basically, it seems like one of the things they were really aiming for here was pro display use, external displays.
00:44:50 ◼ ► And lightning was not designed to handle 5K displays. So to add enough bandwidth or whatever to lightning to make it handle a 5K external display would have required updating the lightning spec, getting new circuitry, new cables, an updated connector maybe.
00:45:15 ◼ ► Rather than make that change, they decided to just go to USB-C because they could already do it.
00:45:20 ◼ ► And so I'm a little curious, and I didn't ask this, I didn't really have time, but from the software side, it seems like a pretty big decision to make for such a probably rare use case.
00:45:32 ◼ ► I don't think there's that many people doing external monitor work on 5K monitors with iPads.
00:45:39 ◼ ► Maybe that's because there wasn't a good way to do it before, but I don't know. I did verify though, so the new USB-C port on the iPads does output full 5K at 60 hertz without any downscaling in transit.
00:45:52 ◼ ► So it's actually full bandwidth. And it's USB 3.1 Gen 2. So the old ones were Gen 1, this is Gen 2.
00:46:02 ◼ ► Oh, I also asked, I mentioned this is the first port transition I think that Apple has had in modern history that has no backwards compatibility adapters.
00:46:14 ◼ ► If you have lightning devices, you can't connect them to the iPad Pro at all through anything.
00:46:21 ◼ ► When they went dock to lightning, there were dongles. When they went USB-C to A, or A to C, there were dongles. When they went FireWire 400 to 800, there were adapters.
00:46:32 ◼ ► It seems like Thunderbolt has only been adapters. I don't think there's ever been a time when in one generation they've changed a port and all the old stuff could not even be adapted to it.
00:46:44 ◼ ► So if you have lightning docks or lightning audio garbage peripherals or anything like that, you just can't plug them in here.
00:46:54 ◼ ► Oh, I was going to say that the lightning cables are the wrong gender plug, but I didn't think about that.
00:47:01 ◼ ► But I'm guessing it won't work for the same reason. Because I asked this and I got a surprisingly technical oriented answer of basically the way you would have to negotiate what's plugged into it.
00:47:12 ◼ ► It would be very hard to design that kind of adapter. It sounds like it's not in the cards. The impression I got is not that they just haven't shipped the dongle yet. It sounds like they're not going to.
00:47:25 ◼ ► Back up a second. I think I missed your answer before. Are there any disadvantages to going from lightning to USB-C?
00:47:35 ◼ ► You described your examples of down-rays, but did Apple say anything? Did they have anything to offer?
00:47:48 ◼ ► A lot of this stuff is going to be me asking a very probing question and getting not really the answer I was looking for, but other interesting information.
00:47:59 ◼ ► The USB-C monitor one, the external monitor one, I'm sure is 100% true and makes some kind of sense.
00:48:07 ◼ ► But as you noted, that is a rare enough use case that I have to think strategically that it's not just that.
00:48:14 ◼ ► That's the reason they gave you and it is a reason and it may be an important reason for some people, but to completely ditch lightning for USB-C has to be part of some larger strategic, longer reaching thing.
00:48:25 ◼ ► I'm surprised they didn't give this answer. They believe long term the number of things that you can do with USB-C on an iPad is greater than the number you'll ever be able to do with lightning.
00:48:34 ◼ ► So it's not just about external monitors. It's basically about, as we've all said, going to a standard port that has more capabilities, whose capabilities have been expanded within the same connector and parameters and probably will be.
00:48:47 ◼ ► At a certain point, I'm sure the iPad Pros are going to have Thunderbolt if they possibly can just because it's the same connector and they'll just creep up there.
00:48:54 ◼ ► That's the more strategic answer that I guess they didn't give because it hints at future things that haven't been announced and then you would have come out and say, "Oh, Apple promises new USB-C peripherals to do these amazing things."
00:49:06 ◼ ► Instead, they just gave you the one concrete use case for this iPad Pro that they have announced and it's a real thing. You can do external video and they're just going to say, "Yeah, use your imagination, but we're not going to talk about that other stuff."
00:49:17 ◼ ► I also asked a lot about USB-C hubs and power and things like that and I got to say it was all good stuff basically.
00:49:26 ◼ ► So number one, right here, I'm going to knock on the microphone here, I finally have my little USB-C power brick from Apple.
00:49:35 ◼ ► And for some reason that the people I spoke to today weren't aware of, you can't buy it separately.
00:49:43 ◼ ► I don't know why, I'm guessing this is a temporary oversight. They didn't seem to think this was a decision.
00:49:53 ◼ ► But it is a wonderful little power adapter. It is approximately the same volume as the old iPad little 10-watt brick that came with pretty much all iPads before this.
00:50:03 ◼ ► It's a slightly different shape, but it's about the same total size and that makes it about slightly larger than the Aukey brand one that I got from Amazon recently that also is an 18-watt USB-P charger, but is probably built with sawdust and cats.
00:50:29 ◼ ► I also asked if the previous iPad Pros added fast charging, but if you looked at actual time tests of people doing fast charge tests, it seems like they weren't drawing that much power through the fast chargers.
00:50:49 ◼ ► And it seemed like the previous ones were not drawing a whole lot more than that, even in fast charge mode.
00:50:56 ◼ ► So I asked if the new one has more, like what is the maximum wattage that it will fast charge at?
00:51:10 ◼ ► So that being said, I've been trying to drain the battery of mine over the last hour so I can see that.
00:51:17 ◼ ► I'm down to 64% and it will only charge, I have a little power measuring thingy, and it will only pull about 27 watts at this rate.
00:51:27 ◼ ► Which is still way better than I think it was before, which I would estimate is closer to the 15 to 18 range before.
00:51:47 ◼ ► I don't know how much faster yet, but it does seem like it's going to at least be significant.
00:51:55 ◼ ► It apparently will charge 7.5 watts outbound, so if you plug something into it, it can supply up to 7.5 watts.
00:52:03 ◼ ► And I thought for like, some of the reviews were a little bit spotty, unlike what would work and what didn't.
00:52:10 ◼ ► I actually brought it to the briefing with a USB-C cable, and so I could plug it in and see if it worked.
00:52:17 ◼ ► And sure enough, the previous iPad 10.5 with the, you know, lightning USB adapter things would not power up the USB Pre.
00:52:31 ◼ ► You would have to use like the weird little like two port one that offered power pass through with like the lightning input for power and the USB port and the lightning output.
00:52:43 ◼ ► So sure enough, the new iPad, I plug in the USB Pre with a USB-C cable right into the side of it, and it powers up fully.
00:52:55 ◼ ► What was the look of the Apple employees in the room when you say, "One moment please!"
00:53:01 ◼ ► And bust out a USB Pre 2, which if you've not seen one, is like the size of a relatively large, or at least relatively thick paperback novel.
00:53:17 ◼ ► Well, as we covered before, physical access to iOS devices does not trump all security.
00:53:25 ◼ ► So they're like, "Go ahead, plug your little toy thing into your iPad. You're not going to crack it."
00:53:31 ◼ ► I asked first. I will say it was less of a weird look than when I took out the kitchen scale to weight the smart keyboard.
00:53:46 ◼ ► So anyway, I asked about the USB mass storage access. This is one thing that every review has cited as a thing, because it is.
00:54:01 ◼ ► Here you have this device that is really a computer replacement in a lot of different ways.
00:54:07 ◼ ► Not in all ways, and not in some big ways, but it is in a lot of ways a computer replacement.
00:54:17 ◼ ► And it seems really weird that the one thing that I think a lot of iPad owners have had to do before and have hit a wall with is like,
00:54:27 ◼ ► "Oh, I have this thumb drive. I want to import the presentation into Keynote or something."
00:54:32 ◼ ► Or, "I have this sound recorder or this camera that recorded stuff onto an SD card that I want to get onto my iPad."
00:54:41 ◼ ► And the only way it supported any of that stuff to date, and still supports it today, is it can import photos from photo storage,
00:55:02 ◼ ► Like, third-party apps are able... There's a few things. I think Jason's talked about these before.
00:55:07 ◼ ► There's a few, I don't know, SanDisk things or something, some brand that sells thumb drives that can work with your iPad.
00:55:15 ◼ ► But that's because they have a custom app that is basically directly accessing the USB port and writing its own file access stuff, basically.
00:55:27 ◼ ► And so, I did ask, "Is this a deliberate choice not to offer this?" Or is it just kind of like, "You haven't gotten there yet?"
00:55:37 ◼ ► And of course, that is implicitly a question about future Apple products, so I didn't really get a straight answer.
00:55:55 ◼ ► Of course I did. So, it didn't seem like the kind of thing that they were being dismissive about.
00:56:01 ◼ ► It seemed like they didn't want to tell me what's coming in the future, but that that probably is coming in the future.
00:56:16 ◼ ► It probably is not like an opinionated choice to say, "No, we don't want anyone to ever access mass storage devices."
00:56:32 ◼ ► it would be very easy for them to put a very simple driver in so that the Files app could see all of your USB mass storage.
00:56:39 ◼ ► And I surmise that the fact that they haven't is just because that's one of the many things that we all think got kicked out of iOS 12 down the road to iOS 13.
00:56:48 ◼ ► And due to the way Apple's release cycles work, a feature like that, even though it would be in terms of code,
00:56:56 ◼ ► like surely is already done, it's like, "Well, you could just release that in a point release of iOS 12."
00:57:00 ◼ ► They still could do that, but Apple's philosophy is like, "Major features and major new functionality go in the big releases."
00:57:09 ◼ ► There's been a few rare occasions where they've released major functionality in a point release, but for the most part,
00:57:18 ◼ ► But you don't know how that's going to perturb iOS 12, and really you want iOS 12 to get more stable as the point releases increase.
00:57:23 ◼ ► So it's just safer and more in keeping with Apple's release philosophy to put that in 13, no matter how trivial it might be,
00:57:33 ◼ ► So I fully expect to see it in iOS 13, and even though we're disappointed that they don't just sneak it out of a point release, we'll live, we'll wait.
00:57:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it seems like the kind of thing that if they're going to do a major update to iOS to even further increase productivity of iPad stuff,
00:57:50 ◼ ► that seems like a low-hanging fruit. I know it isn't super simple in the sense that you probably don't want to have people opening files directly off the card,
00:57:58 ◼ ► because then what happens if they eject the card? So you probably want to have it copy the files over first or something,
00:58:10 ◼ ► There are a lot of implications for apps and all sorts of, like, there are, even though writing the code is simple, and just to get it to work, right, right,
00:58:17 ◼ ► there's like one day of work for Steve Drownsmith, the implications that that has for the whole rest of the system and the applications and everything,
00:58:23 ◼ ► that takes much more thought and probably relies on stuff that's been done in iOS 13 and everything like that.
00:58:30 ◼ ► So it does make some kind of sense that they wouldn't try to rush that out to you, and they're not going to tell you that it got booted out of iOS 12 or whatever,
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01:00:19 ◼ ► A few more miscellaneous things here. I'm gonna try to go through these quickly because it's getting kind of boring.
01:00:26 ◼ ► The new USB-C to headphone adapter is a standard USB audio device. It works with Macs. It works with anything.
01:00:39 ◼ ► "What are people supposed to do if they want to listen to headphones and charge it at the same time?"
01:00:44 ◼ ► And the answer basically is, "You can now use hubs for that," which is not a great answer.
01:00:49 ◼ ► I wish there were better solutions, but that is an answer in the sense that all standard USB-C hubs work.
01:01:01 ◼ ► So if you want to have charging while having something else plugged in, you can do that the same way Casey's doing it with his dumb 12-inch laptop.
01:01:09 ◼ ► You have a power pass-through hub, and you plug the power cable into the power pass-through port,
01:01:17 ◼ ► which is way better than the old weird lightning thing you had to buy from Belkin to do this on the iPhone.
01:01:24 ◼ ► It's still a dongle, it's still a hub, but it's less horrible than other ones, I guess.
01:01:31 ◼ ► So you're going to hog the one USB-C pass-through port that's not used for power and use it for your headphones.
01:01:37 ◼ ► It also would have been better if they made a USB-A to headphone adapter because, as we pointed out,
01:02:05 ◼ ► Like, talking to iPad people, talking to Mac people, it just seems like Apple is a big fan of USB-C hubs.
01:02:18 ◼ ► Because, like, it seems, for this exact reason, like, it seems like you would want two, like, in an ideal world.
01:02:33 ◼ ► But, like, it wouldn't be bad to have two because then you could have power input along with a peripheral of some kind,
01:02:43 ◼ ► It's like, if you're going to use the port at all, you probably want two of them. Right, Casey?
01:03:08 ◼ ► You know, so, again, this is, like, I don't mind that. Like, in these very few chances I've had to talk to, you know, people at Apple in this kind of capacity,
01:03:18 ◼ ► I think there, about, like, half the value of it is for me to get answers to little nitpicky questions.
01:03:24 ◼ ► The other half of the value is for me to make my case to people who are, you know, pretty strong decision makers, probably, in these areas,
01:03:31 ◼ ► to, like, to say, like, "Here's something I care about that I would like you to address."
01:03:36 ◼ ► Right? Like, and I really, I take that opportunity very seriously, and I really treasure the chance to do it, as I'm sure…
01:03:44 ◼ ► I see you coming a mile away. It's like, "If Mark Weber asks a question you don't want to answer, just ask him what he thinks about it."
01:03:52 ◼ ► But, you know, look, Apple's a company of smart people who argue with each other and try to figure out what's right to do.
01:03:59 ◼ ► Right? And so, like, if I can give a counterargument or an argument to why something is a good idea or why something should change or should be done,
01:04:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel like multiple USB ports are an inevitability in the iPad line, so, you know, they obviously know more.
01:04:16 ◼ ► They know their future plans, so maybe they have been testing for the past six months an iPad for USB-C, but it's inevitable.
01:04:23 ◼ ► Like, you can't, especially as they get larger, especially when they go to, like, the third size and they start getting big enough,
01:04:28 ◼ ► you know, like, it's going to happen, but not this year and probably not next year and probably not the year after that, you know, so we'll have to wait a while.
01:04:35 ◼ ► But them asking you about it is the strongest hint you're going to get is that this is a thing we've already thought about and we'd love to hear your thoughts on, you know,
01:04:42 ◼ ► because it's the same thing with the USB mass storage. What would you use that for? That's interesting.
01:04:53 ◼ ► One of the things I asked, I did try to pick up the iPad by the Pencil very carefully, like, over a couch.
01:05:02 ◼ ► It doesn't, it isn't as firmly held on there as I would have liked, but it is pretty firmly on there.
01:05:08 ◼ ► As a couple of other users pointed out, I think, you know, the main vulnerability is if you, like, push it side to side as opposed to just pulling it straight off, it'll move a lot more easily.
01:05:19 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. And it's just kind of like, you know, the physics of how magnets and stuff work.
01:05:24 ◼ ► So anyway, one thing I noticed about the new Pencil design is that, like, I've seen a lot of Apple Pencils in the wild where people have some kind of ergonomic grip on them,
01:05:37 ◼ ► whether it's something fancy like what Mike has, like there's like metal barrel around the whole thing,
01:05:41 ◼ ► or whether it's like one of those, like, rubber triangle things that we all had in school that, like, made pencils easier to hold. You know what I'm talking about?
01:05:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I mentioned that a couple of weeks ago when I was talking about how the Apple Pencil is designed as an ideal solid and not as a thing that fits in people's hands.
01:05:55 ◼ ► And when I saw the magnetic thing that solves the problem of where to put the pencil, I immediately thought that solves a whole mess of problems,
01:06:02 ◼ ► but causes one that didn't exist before, which is now you can't have a cool ergonomic rubber grip thing, but then how the hell do you charge it?
01:06:07 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. I asked, like, you know, basically, like, how much thickness can you add to the pencil before it stops charging?
01:06:19 ◼ ► It wasn't zero, but it's like, you know, on the order of, like, you know, one or two millimeters. So, like, you could maybe do, like, a vinyl wrap, but not like a case, or not like a grip or anything like that.
01:06:30 ◼ ► Like, anything like that is going to make it too far from the enough to charge or to charge.
01:06:34 ◼ ► You can have this starting to get into nightmare territory, but you got to have something that is kind of like a creature that opens up, like, that's like a rubber thing.
01:06:42 ◼ ► You know, they have those toys that are like rubber with metal armatures inside them, like, that it would open up so you could attach it and there would just be a thin film between it.
01:06:54 ◼ ► Like a facehugger or a Metroid or something, something that clasps your Apple Pencil in a death grip.
01:07:06 ◼ ► I also asked, can anything else charge the new pencil? Like, suppose you were, like, managing a bunch of them and you wanted to bulk charge them. No, you can't.
01:07:14 ◼ ► Well, the aforementioned things from China will absolutely be able to charge your pencil.
01:07:19 ◼ ► Yeah, because it's just inductive charging. It's not rocket science. Someone will easily be able to, unless they put DRM on the charging of some kind, some sort of security thing.
01:07:26 ◼ ► Like, I'm not talking about pairing, but just purely charging, someone will be able to make something that does.
01:07:30 ◼ ► Now, whether someone would want to make something that does it, like, where would you put that and what would the use case be? I don't know.
01:07:38 ◼ ► I mean, one use case would be, like, suppose you have, like, a big fleet of these in, like, some big office or school or something.
01:07:42 ◼ ► You want to, like, bulk charge all the pencils at night. But it seems like now that you could just stick them on top of the iPad, it seems like that's really the answer.
01:07:48 ◼ ► Well, that'll actually be interesting. Like, we talked about the pencil canoes in Apple stores, where the pencils are.
01:07:55 ◼ ► But if anyone had the need to potentially bulk charge a bunch of Apple pencils, it might be Apple stores.
01:08:00 ◼ ► So maybe Apple stores will have somewhere in the back room that exact thing you just talked about.
01:08:05 ◼ ► Yeah, the secret bulk pencil charger. I asked if the charge rate is slower now that it's inductive.
01:08:11 ◼ ► Didn't get a strong answer on that, but the answer I got is a good explanation at least, basically, or a good dodge at least.
01:08:17 ◼ ► Basically, like, you know, it matters a lot less now because, like, the pencil will so rarely have to charge from zero now.
01:08:25 ◼ ► Because it's, you know, if you can just stick it on top, it's going to be 100% charged almost every time you pick it up.
01:08:31 ◼ ► And I asked, like, how the battery, like, you know, if you're just using it continuously, where you're never putting it down, you're just using it continuously, like, how does the battery life compare to the first pencil?
01:08:40 ◼ ► And they didn't have exact figures, but they did say the battery is very slightly smaller to fit some of the new stuff inside.
01:08:47 ◼ ► So it might be a little bit less in that scenario, but it's likely to matter a lot less because, you know, it's always fully charged.
01:08:53 ◼ ► I was surprised they didn't tell you that you have two pencils, one always charging, one in your hand.
01:09:02 ◼ ► Exactly. Yeah, actually, I don't think there's any reason or anything to prevent you from doing that besides $130.
01:09:12 ◼ ► The multiplayer people definitely need to try that because, like, so you can do, like, 11 touch points or something and technically the pencil is probably just one other touch point.
01:09:19 ◼ ► I suppose there probably aren't many drawing applications that expect you to be drawing with two pencils at once, but now this is the thing I need to see.
01:09:25 ◼ ► We also don't know, like, the pencil, I think, uses a special type of digitizer to recognize itself.
01:09:33 ◼ ► I also asked, like, you know, we didn't really hear anything about the pencil's performance. Like, it's obviously a form factor change, but, like, is anything different about, like, is it more pressure sensitive?
01:09:43 ◼ ► Is it more, you know, higher response rate? Anything like that? Is any of that stuff different?
01:09:50 ◼ ► And that's honestly, that's fine. All that stuff, in my opinion, as a layman, none of that stuff needed to change.
01:10:02 ◼ ► I also learned that the capacitive area of it is basically, like, the lower third of the pencil.
01:10:10 ◼ ► Like, if you look, I think, I think Panzarino's article had, like, a diagram of where the magnets are in the pencil.
01:10:15 ◼ ► And basically, like, as soon as the magnet ends from that point down to the tip, it's all, that whole surface is capacitive.
01:10:27 ◼ ► You can be anywhere around the barrel, as long as it's in that bottom third of the pencil.
01:10:34 ◼ ► So you don't have to hold it in a certain way that puts the flat part under your index finger.
01:10:39 ◼ ► Like, you can rotate it and have the flat part be anywhere, and you can still have double tap access with your index finger.
01:10:45 ◼ ► And apparently, again, Steve Trouton Smith on Twitter, before the event even, was finding a gesture, pencil gesture recognizers in iOS.
01:10:58 ◼ ► But hardware-wise, it seemed, and you mentioned it in a capacitive area, hardware-wise, it seems like the pencil is capable of gestures.
01:11:08 ◼ ► Because as hard as it is to get taps to be, like, intentional, like, Apple emphasizes very strongly in their sort of WWC-style videos that if you add this to your application, you should honor the system setting.
01:11:21 ◼ ► I mean, if you want to have custom settings, that's fine, but like, the honoring the system setting is important because if someone in the system says, "Ignore taps to the pencil,"
01:11:29 ◼ ► because say they're a nervous pencil tapper, like if that's their idle animation to use video game parlance, right?
01:11:36 ◼ ► Like, Apple says, "Don't make it a destructive action," because if someone does it accidentally, you don't want them to, like, delete half their document accidentally.
01:11:44 ◼ ► So if double tapping is a thing that you can do accidentally, finger gestures, like sliding your finger along the pencil, talk about a thing that you could do accidentally.
01:11:55 ◼ ► If the entire lower third of the pencil is capacitive, it would be very difficult to distinguish an intentional pencil gesture from someone just sliding their fingers around a pencil as part of the natural use.
01:12:09 ◼ ► But hardware-wise, it's kind of cool that the pencil has the ability to do more, and I can imagine that coming into, like, maybe it's just a custom per-application thing that you can actually turn on to have more sophisticated gestures for very complicated applications where the pencil would recognize both a tap and a slide gesture.
01:12:26 ◼ ► Of course, the slide gesture immediately made me think of being able to slide my finger along my AirPods to change the volume.
01:12:32 ◼ ► But, yeah, so as is the case with many things related to the iPad Pro, as Jason so eloquently put it in something he wrote on six colors, the hardware is willing, but the software is weak.
01:12:57 ◼ ► If you notice on the very back, if you have a smart keyboard, get it out now, listener, and look, like, straight on the edge of it that, like, if you look at the upper left and upper right keys, the tilde and the delete key, and you go straight up from there to the edge of the smart keyboard cover, there are, like, five or six little tiny vent holes.
01:13:26 ◼ ► And I noticed this the other day, and the new ones have it too, and so I asked, what are those holes?
01:13:34 ◼ ► Yeah, when you push down on a key, you know, if it was sealed up, it wouldn't, like, it wouldn't have feedback or anything, so, like, it wouldn't be able to depress particularly well, so they're actually air holes.
01:13:43 ◼ ► It would be a pneumatic pressure keyboard, where the bounce back of the key would be from the air pressure that's built up when you press down on it. It would be a very unpleasing feeling.
01:13:56 ◼ ► Also, on the keyboard, I don't know if this is because it's new, but it does feel like it has more feedback than mine.
01:14:27 ◼ ► Number one was when you first got it, there was a pretty good chance that it wouldn't sit flat on a table.
01:14:33 ◼ ► And if that happened to you, that was often never fixed, because there was some kind of problem with making it, or the way the fabric would bend, or whatever, that made it very common, and this happened to me, where it just wouldn't sit flat.
01:14:49 ◼ ► The way the new one is designed, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's going to be a problem, because it's not doing the kind of crazy bends that the old one did.
01:14:59 ◼ ► Also, the whole bottom plate of the new smart keyboard is one piece, instead of before it was two.
01:15:06 ◼ ► Before you had the part that was in front of the iPad, and the part that was behind it, before my little triangle.
01:15:11 ◼ ► And it could swivel on that little hinge point there, which made it also suck in your lap.
01:15:20 ◼ ► It's still not amazing, like a laptop, because the weight balances off, but it's better, it's way better than it was.
01:15:25 ◼ ► And this actually, like, one of the big things for me of how I'm going to justify upgrading is that.
01:15:30 ◼ ► Because I use it in my lap a lot, and the smart keyboard is way better on your lap now than it was before.
01:15:36 ◼ ► As for the size, I have the 12 9 here, I don't have the 11, but I was able to play with it there.
01:15:51 ◼ ► The 12 9 is really big still. It is less big, and I would actually recommend it if you are an iPad power user.
01:16:02 ◼ ► If you really get a lot of work done on the iPad, if you multitask a lot, if you are doing heavy productivity,
01:16:09 ◼ ► if you're drawing on it, maybe you want a bigger drawing area, or things like that, I would suggest checking out the 12 9.
01:16:39 ◼ ► It's closer than it's ever been, and so if you have been meaning to check out the large size, I would suggest you do so.
01:16:57 ◼ ► Actually, going to the city is way nicer than it used to be, because there's a Shake Shack in Grand Central now.
01:17:07 ◼ ► You know what you're supposed to suggest to them, thinking back to their headphone thing in the house, they've got a camera bump.
01:17:14 ◼ ► Obviously the camera is a little bit more important than the headphone jack, but you know, you can put a headphone jack bump in there.
01:17:44 ◼ ► I have nothing ordered yet, because by the time I decided to place an order, it was backordered.
01:17:51 ◼ ► And I'm like, "All right, fine. I'll just go to the store on Wednesday that they come out."
01:18:05 ◼ ► I was very much on the fence between the sizes, because when we had the hands-on area, I remember being very surprised how big the 12-9 wasn't.
01:18:31 ◼ ► The 11-inch, well, the 10.5 and that class, always kind of feel like it's just a big phone window that you're browsing.
01:18:43 ◼ ► A lot of times you'll have to do a lot of scrolling to see something on a web page or things like that.
01:18:52 ◼ ► There's still going to be some functional differences, just in the way Mobile Safari works.
01:18:57 ◼ ► But the viewport that you get and the scale that you get of web pages, you feel like you're just using a desktop.
01:19:05 ◼ ► So if I did more stuff that involved reading big websites or productivity stuff, then I would go for the big one.
01:19:39 ◼ ► But one thing I do like a lot about the 12-9, besides the sheer size of web pages, is the aspect ratio.
01:19:59 ◼ ► That's like, the height, since I'm usually using it in landscape because of the keyboard,
01:20:10 ◼ ► So I actually would like seeing the 12-9 here, it's like, oh, this is actually nice to see this kind of height.
01:20:16 ◼ ► I wish the 11-inch expanded in the other direction, but that would also make it closer to square.
01:20:36 ◼ ► Whenever I've been to a Microsoft store and I've picked up the big 15-inch Surface tablet thing,
01:20:47 ◼ ► It feels really cool for a second, and to actually hold it in one hand and draw with it with the pencil with the other hand,
01:21:00 ◼ ► So I do get kind of that feeling with the 12-9, like, boy, wouldn't this be cool if I was a different kind of person than I am?
01:21:05 ◼ ► If I was actually somebody who would use a giant pad of paper, that would be really cool.
01:21:26 ◼ ► But now that I have the bigger one in hand for tonight, I've already decided, like, yeah, I actually don't want the bigger one after all.
01:21:34 ◼ ► So the 11-inch just gets taller, like, in the ratio that it already was taller, but it gets even taller still in that dimension.
01:21:53 ◼ ► If you have it in portrait, the home indicator eats some space, but then you get that space back because it's got, like, 164 extra points, or pixels, I forget which, in that dimension.
01:22:04 ◼ ► And overall, the 11-inch, you know, if you're talking about a GUI and not a video or something, the safe area insets eat, because it's got rounded corners, eat some of your content area.
01:22:15 ◼ ► So I'm kind of glad that it got bigger in at least one dimension to partially offset the safe area insets that we all now have to deal with in anything with a UI.
01:22:23 ◼ ► The 12-9 is so big anyway that the safe area insets as a percentage are less of a big deal.
01:22:29 ◼ ► And as someone who watches a lot of video on the iPad, if I end up getting an 11-inch that's like this iPad someday, I'm kind of glad that it got wider, just because that means a typical, you know, letterbox-style wide video will make a more efficient use of the space.
01:22:44 ◼ ► The letterboxing will be less because it's wider. So that's good for me, but, you know, I can't remember where you're coming from with the 4 by 3 thing and having a more square ratio, closer to square ratio being more versatile for a device that may be used in portrait and may be used in landscape to view content.
01:23:02 ◼ ► Yeah. The other thing too is like using the 12-9 just again for only a couple hours so far, but like so much of iOS just feels like it was not designed to be this big. And you really like that's always a problem on iPad OS to some degree, but on the 12-9 it seems extreme.
01:23:18 ◼ ► Like it seems like you just have like these, you know, massive empty spaces or huge, like big wide text areas for no apparent reason.
01:23:32 ◼ ► Yeah. But like, yeah, definitely like the iPad OS is still not really ideal at this size. Everything does feel a little bit too big and too spaced out as if they're just kind of killing space because they don't, they don't have anything to do with it yet.
01:23:46 ◼ ► I wonder how that changes over time, but for right now it's just like, it's everything's just really big and spread out and that works really well on web pages and not so well on a lot of other places. Also, it's been reported elsewhere too that like the apps that were not built with 12-1 SDK that just came out, they will, they're kind of letterbox in a special way when they're shown on this iPad.
01:24:10 ◼ ► Almost every third party app I've launched so far has been letterboxed in this way. I don't know if, if just the app store has not opened, it's opened the gates yet for that.
01:24:18 ◼ ► Or if more likely like developers just haven't had a chance, like I haven't updated Overcast yet for that because I haven't a chance. Like I've had like a few days to do it.
01:24:25 ◼ ► It's going to be probably a while before most of the apps you use on the iPad are updated. So you're going to be seeing a lot of black boxes.
01:24:34 ◼ ► So like if you're thinking about maybe getting this iPad and like I would say like, A, you probably do want it. It looks pretty cool. And so far it's pretty awesome.
01:24:43 ◼ ► But B, maybe you shouldn't be in a huge rush to get it. Like if you can't get it for like a few weeks, that's fine because like right now the software really isn't there yet to support it. And it might take a while.
01:24:55 ◼ ► I think it'll be quick because everyone did all the Safari Inset work for the iPhone X and they do need to recompile and link against the 12.1 SDK. But I think it might just be a straight recompile for a lot of people to just quickly get your 12.1 update.
01:25:07 ◼ ► Like you've got your iPhone X version, do a quick validation that yes, if you compile with 12.1 SDK, that Safari Inset save your butt on the iPad and then just ship it.
01:25:16 ◼ ► I think that's what James Thompson was saying he was doing with PCALC that basically all he needed to do was rebuild while PCALC filled the whole iPad Pro in the simulator or whatever.
01:25:26 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's probably all I'm going to have to do as well. But like people don't update their iPad apps necessarily that often.
01:25:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm still mad at Instagram for that. Like what a perfect consumption platform for Instagram and they just refuse to do it. But that's a separate issue I guess.
01:25:45 ◼ ► But yeah, iPad apps in general are often low priorities for companies which is a separate problem that holds back the iPad in other ways.
01:25:54 ◼ ► But it was easy with the iPhone X when that came out, there was huge motivation to update your app to the newest iPhone.
01:26:01 ◼ ► But when new iPads come out, especially when it's only high-end ones that are affected, I don't think developers have as much motivation to update it.
01:26:08 ◼ ► Not indies like me who are trying to be fancy crash people. I'm talking about big companies. How the hell is a big company going to justify doing this?
01:26:16 ◼ ► How long did it take people like Google to do split view and stuff? I think it might be a little while before apps are meaningfully updated for this.
01:26:24 ◼ ► Speaking of split view, Apple talked about this I think in their developer videos as well.
01:26:28 ◼ ► If you have applications in split view and if one of them isn't compliant with all the Safari insets and linked against 12.9.8, all the other applications in the split view get letterbox in that way.
01:26:41 ◼ ► Even if every application except the badly behaving one has been updated, I guess for uniformity purposes so you don't have one bigger than the other, they all revert to the weird letterbox black stuff around the outside mode.
01:26:52 ◼ ► Which is kind of disappointing because as you just pointed out, Google is probably going to take forever to update their things.
01:26:58 ◼ ► So if you use Google Docs in any capacity on your iOS, on your big new iPad Pro, and you do any kind of multitasking, guess what? All your other applications are going to be...
01:27:06 ◼ ► It's not that noticeable letterboxing, but once you know it's there, it's kind of annoying that you're losing pixels because of one non-updated app.
01:27:24 ◼ ► You talked about the keyboard but like the pencil, does the matte finish really make as big a difference as people have said?
01:27:30 ◼ ► Because when I played with it last week, I mean I've used a pencil for 10 minutes, so it didn't make a big difference to me.
01:27:43 ◼ ► She hasn't had a chance yet because she was busy using it too, but I hope to get that done by next week. So I can have her impressions.
01:27:50 ◼ ► Otherwise, my impression of using it for two seconds is the new one feels a lot better.
01:28:05 ◼ ► It's a place to put your fingers. It's a place to orient it and to feel... You can now feel better the transition between the flat part and when it starts to taper into the cone shape to form the point.
01:28:20 ◼ ► So when I'm holding it, I can put a finger there on that transition between the flat and the taper.
01:28:27 ◼ ► And I can have my middle finger on that, my index finger further up on the grip on the flat part, and my thumb on the opposite side.
01:28:37 ◼ ► It's a really stable, firm grip. It feels good. The old pencil, you couldn't do that because it was a smooth finish and it would then have a smooth transition into the taper.
01:28:48 ◼ ► And so it was easy to have your finger slide around on that. And the new one, you don't have that. The new one, your finger can feel that edge and can anchor itself in place.
01:28:59 ◼ ► And so you have a feel orientation. It's almost like a difference between using a real controller versus using touch buttons, like a touch virtual D-pad on a screen for a game.
01:29:10 ◼ ► You need to feel the orientation of where your fingers are to have good control. The old pencil didn't have that so much. The new one does.
01:29:18 ◼ ► So that I think is a huge difference in addition to all the other stuff, like the charging and everything.
01:29:24 ◼ ► And so to me, the pencil is the story of this. It's funny, I had more questions about the pencil, the keyboard, and the port than I did about the iPad itself, like the internals of the iPad.
01:29:37 ◼ ► And I had almost no questions about that. Because to me, what makes the iPad Pro useful to me is not most of its internal stuff because the internal stuff was already great before.
01:29:49 ◼ ► It didn't really need to get any better. It did, which is nice, it's welcome, but it was already great. It was already way more than what I needed to do the small amount of work I do on my iPad.
01:30:00 ◼ ► What I wanted though was better accessories because I use the smart keyboard all the time. I want to use the pencil and never could because it was never there.
01:30:11 ◼ ► And the accessories changed this product for me. Now that I always have a pencil stuck to the top of it, then maybe I'll use something like the wonderful Apple Aplinea by icon factory to be like a sketchpad.
01:30:25 ◼ ► To doodle a quick diagram of something when I want to show someone something or explain something or to think something through. Maybe some quick math trigonometry for a thing I'm working on in code or something.
01:30:36 ◼ ► I don't use paper a lot, but I do use it sometimes. And I would like to have that ability whenever I'm out with my iPad to have something like that.
01:30:44 ◼ ► And with the old pencil it was just never there. It was never with me, it was never charged. It was probably somewhere buried on Tiff's desk because she couldn't find hers because hers was somewhere discharged and not with her.
01:30:56 ◼ ► And so it was just always a mess. It was such an afterthought almost, the way it was designed before. And now it's actually designed for the way people use it.
01:31:07 ◼ ► There was a period there where it seemed like Apple was not designing so many things that way. And now I think that's changing. I think it's changing for the better finally. And I'm very, very happy to see that.
01:31:19 ◼ ► And the smart keyboard. The previous smart keyboard was fine. It wasn't great. It was fine. It had some issues. And I just kind of thought, well here's this kind of half-assed product that Apple made as an accessory and it's fine.
01:31:33 ◼ ► It's never going to be good but this is as good as I guess we're going to get and I'll live with it.
01:31:38 ◼ ► It wasn't until I saw the new one and used it that I realized, oh that old one was crap. Because it turns out, oh it was so tippy and wobbly in my lap and didn't cover the back and everything else.
01:31:50 ◼ ► And the new one is really nice. The accessories make this product really. And they're really, really good. Also, just like totally subjectively, I love the new physical design of the iPad. The new Edge, my god it looks so good. I love the flat Edge so much.
01:32:09 ◼ ► It just looks awesome. It looks modern. The old one now with its curve, everything being the curved Edge, it looks and feels really dated now. And I don't know if I would have thought that a week ago.
01:32:24 ◼ ► But now it's like, oh my god, those curved Edges are giant. The iPad had the same shape since the iPad 2. It just never changed. It just always had that curved Edge. It looked and felt really old. And this new one looks and feels incredibly modern and really nice.
01:32:47 ◼ ► I'm curious about the pencil usage too. On the one hand, I feel like if you're not the type of person who uses a pencil, having a better place to store it is not going to change that about you. I always just thought about the storage place for the pencil was for people who use the pencil all the time and just grumble as they use the pencil. Now where is that pencil? Or it's attached by some weird thing or it's not charged or whatever.
01:33:06 ◼ ► But if you're not the type of person that uses the pencil, I predict that you're going to stick the pencil on the side of the thing. And maybe you'll get away with it because you use it as a kitchen computer and it's always just sitting there in the kitchen with the keyboard and with the pencil sitting there on top of it. It will always be there for you.
01:33:19 ◼ ► But for anybody who carries around their iPad or uses it without a keyboard most of the time, the pencil will probably kind of get in the way. If you weren't already using the pencil and already annoyed that you didn't have a good place to put it, I'm not sure this will turn you into a pencil user.
01:33:35 ◼ ► Because the use cases for the pencil as far as what you can do with it in the OS are about the same as they've always been. And yeah, this is a better iteration of the pencil in terms of the ergonomics you just mentioned, but still I don't think it changes the math.
01:33:46 ◼ ► So I think maybe you'll get away with it just because the pencil is not harming you in any way when it's sitting there on top of the thing, but I'm not sure it's going to convert people.
01:33:56 ◼ ► As for the ergonomics of the pencil, yeah, obvious improvement, but still a long way to go to get to the ergonomic grip type of thing. And honestly, they'll never do that for the same reason. They'll make a robotic pencil.
01:34:08 ◼ ► You don't want to make a pencil that makes that decision for you and says, "Oh, well, we think everybody wants one of those weird ergonomic grip triangular shaped rubber things." No, everybody doesn't want that.
01:34:18 ◼ ► So your best bet is to make a pencil that accepts that type of thing if you want it and does some minimal nod towards ergonomics by not being glossy, by not being perfectly cylindrical, so on and so forth, but doesn't make all those decisions and lets people add to the pencil as needed.
01:34:33 ◼ ► Although hearing people talk about the pencil, I have one too. I'm not a pencil person. It sits next to my iPad, but I rarely use it.
01:34:41 ◼ ► And it just makes me feel like such an old man when I try to do anything with the pencil, like drawing with it or whatever, because I feel like drawing with a pencil, as someone who grew up drawing a lot with plain old graphite pencils made of wood, drawing with the Apple pencil or any other stylus type device makes me feel like it's like the equivalent of driving a car by throwing marbles into buckets attached to pulleys.
01:35:06 ◼ ► Like throw five marbles in that bucket, the bucket pulls down the rope on the pulley and the car turns left. That's how distant I feel. And it's like, "Well, what do you mean how distant? Aren't you drawing directly on the screen?"
01:35:18 ◼ ► It's like, "Yeah, but it's a pencil thing that's skittering along glass, that's not actually making marks, that like an accelerometer or whatever gyroscope is detecting my angle." Compared to actually taking a graphite pencil and dragging it across a piece of the paper, something that I'm just intimately familiar with from my entire life and my childhood, this feels so distant.
01:35:41 ◼ ► And that makes me an old person because people who grow up with this technology and use it as their tool, it's what they're noodling on their whole childhood to do drawings and stuff like that, feels perfectly natural to them.
01:35:52 ◼ ► And this is a good iteration of it, but when you mentioned Marco, like, "Oh, the things having to do with the pencil don't need to be improved in terms of the drawing response and stuff like that."
01:36:01 ◼ ► I think they need to be improved massively. It's not just because I'm an old man, but like, again, go back to that responsiveness video from that tech demo for the Microsoft hat or whatever. I think even artists would appreciate a 10x or 100x increase in responsiveness of the pencil.
01:36:17 ◼ ► But the thing that really makes me feel distant is the fact that it's not a little piece of graphite that I rub on paper and it leaves little… that's not what it is. That's not what it will ever be. And that's the advantage of it, obviously, that you can erase infinitely.
01:36:32 ◼ ► It can be a brush, it can be a pencil, it can be a marker. I get all that. But every time I use it, I just feel like I would never choose to draw this way.
01:36:42 ◼ ► And that's what makes me feel old. I can never go away from the actual pencil if I ever wanted to draw something, right? I don't know.
01:36:52 ◼ ► I don't know if you feel that way and use it in terms of if you're just going to draw math problems or whatever. Would you feel like, "You know what? I would feel better drawing this math problem on a piece of paper with a pencil."
01:37:02 ◼ ► Even though it's not an artistic endeavor, you're just drawing equations and stuff, or does it just feel fine to you?
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01:38:33 ◼ ► What's the oddest experience you've had of applying programmer thinking to something else, especially in your personal life?"
01:38:38 ◼ ► You know, I don't feel like I have a particularly awesome question to this, or awesome answer to this,
01:38:44 ◼ ► other than to say that I feel like being a developer has helped me break down problems into smaller chunks better,
01:38:53 ◼ ► because that's a lot of times what development is all about is, you know, how do you make a podcast player?
01:39:03 ◼ ► Right, well, how do you download the files? Well, you need to have an RSS reader and you need to go get those files.
01:39:12 ◼ ► And I feel like that sort of thinking has helped a lot, but unfortunately I don't have any particular, like, specific stories that I think really well encapsulate this.
01:39:22 ◼ ► But I love the question so much, so I'm hoping that one of you will save me, maybe, maybe, Marco, since you've been talking a lot,
01:39:27 ◼ ► understandably, John, you can give Marco a breather, and maybe is there an example of this in your life where being a developer has really changed the way you handled the situation?
01:39:37 ◼ ► I don't think so. I think my experience is the reverse, that me being the way I am has helped me be a programmer.
01:39:44 ◼ ► Because I started to think about it, you know, trying to come up with examples where I've applied lessons for programming in real life, but it's really the opposite.
01:39:53 ◼ ► Programming presents certain problems to you, and to be able to solve them requires you to bring to bear your experience elsewhere in life.
01:40:05 ◼ ► At least that's how it feels to me, that I look at a programming problem and then I use everything that I've learned from, obviously, from all my life programming,
01:40:12 ◼ ► but also, just like, you know, in my initial forays into programming, I was bringing myself to the table saying, like,
01:40:19 ◼ ► these qualities about, you know, the way I work, the way I think about things, the way I operate, in all aspects of life, are the reason that I am suited to be a programmer,
01:40:29 ◼ ► because they are useful in that context, because programming is tractable in that way, like, that it makes sense in that particular way.
01:40:36 ◼ ► I'm sure that's not entirely true, I'm sure there is some case of the reverse, but nothing dramatic comes to mind,
01:40:44 ◼ ► and I think I was going to offer, like, the same thing that you just said, Casey, like, breaking a problem down into smaller pieces or whatever,
01:40:53 ◼ ► Like, we'd like to think it is, because we'd like to think that the real world is, you know, tractable in the same way that computers are,
01:41:00 ◼ ► but it's not, there's many other variables that you don't see, so I feel like the things that make me good at programming are separate from things that are useful in the real world,
01:41:12 ◼ ► and the overlap between them is, in my experience, surprisingly small, it's two very different skill sets.
01:41:17 ◼ ► Now, all that said, I feel like the skills that are useful elsewhere in the world are very important for the job of being a programmer,
01:41:26 ◼ ► because the job of being a programmer, contrary to what many people think, especially if you're not a programmer, is not just you and the computer.
01:41:32 ◼ ► There are other people involved. There's the person who's going to use your program, presumably, if there's any person other than you, right?
01:41:37 ◼ ► There's all the people that you work with. There's so many aspects to being a working programmer that have nothing to do with you and the computer.
01:41:44 ◼ ► You know, mastering and becoming better at the part where you type code into the computer is such a small aspect of being a real programmer in the modern world,
01:41:54 ◼ ► that all the skills that you need to hold down any job, really, but also to be a programmer in a real job, in a real company with real people,
01:42:03 ◼ ► those skills definitely translate elsewhere in life. And again, hopefully you're bringing those skills to your job as a programmer and not learning them on the job as a programmer,
01:42:16 ◼ ► I don't really have any good stories about a particular thing that I approached weirdly as a programmer in real life,
01:42:23 ◼ ► but I will say that it infects the way I think all the time. Anything that I have to do twice, I'm starting to look at how can I possibly automate this into a subroutine.
01:42:37 ◼ ► How can I break this out? I'm not going to repeat work. I'm not going to copy and paste activity.
01:42:43 ◼ ► I'm going to actually make something that makes me never have to do this thing again, which mostly is laziness.
01:42:57 ◼ ► Like, whenever we're in the world and something that we're interacting with or depending on or trying to use doesn't work quite right,
01:43:12 ◼ ► Like, I'm like, "Oh, they're having slave lag on their back end." Or something. I can feel like, "Oh, I know this problem. I've seen this problem. I've caused this problem."
01:43:21 ◼ ► Like, "Oh, this is clearly, oh, the screen didn't refresh in time and there's a race with this other thing.
01:43:30 ◼ ► I can kind of feel by just observing the symptoms of how things are not working correctly, I kind of understand what has probably happened,
01:43:40 ◼ ► because I've dealt with so many bugs in so many things that, like, you know, mostly in my own code,
01:43:54 ◼ ► And I can gather very quickly the behavior of a system and what it's doing and why it's doing it. Does that make sense?
01:44:04 ◼ ► You mentioned the not wanting to repeat an operation that can be automated or whatever. I think the reason I gave the answer I did is that I have, probably uniquely among the three of us,
01:44:14 ◼ ► experienced being a person before computers existed in any meaningful way in their life, right?
01:44:19 ◼ ► So in my childhood, before, certainly before computers were in my life in any fashion, like that individual people didn't have computers, before I got my VIC-20, let's say, right, my first computer,
01:44:29 ◼ ► I was already thinking in that way in terms of, like, doing chores and fantasizing about designing machines to do my chores, like it's a repetitive task,
01:44:38 ◼ ► and you realize that it can be automated, and if you do it once, it seems like a waste to do it, like, from scratch each time, right?
01:44:44 ◼ ► That's, you know, thinking in terms of gadgets, again, ropes and pulleys and buckets and mechanical robots and other things like that,
01:44:50 ◼ ► before the world of computers, is why I say that I brought my "that self" to the task of programming, and it's like,
01:44:57 ◼ ► "Oh, here's a realm in which I can actually do those things without having to, you know, fashion a Rube-Grow board device to, you know, clean the toilet for me or whatever."
01:45:06 ◼ ► And, you know, same deal with the, like, finding bugs in systems or whatever, like realizing why things aren't working.
01:45:13 ◼ ► What I'm realizing what's not working is the literal thing I'm trying to build out of ropes and pulleys in my backyard with sticks and figuring out why it is in my head, I imagine this would work,
01:45:22 ◼ ► but here now I am with these sticks and this rope and these hammers and this nail and whatever, and why is it not working?
01:45:28 ◼ ► Debugging that physical world system and figuring it out, I brought that to programming as well, because it's a thing that, you know,
01:45:37 ◼ ► instead of just throwing up your hands and saying, "Well, I thought it would work and it wouldn't, oh well, why doesn't it work?" or whatever.
01:45:42 ◼ ► So, maybe if you don't have the experience of being a kid before computers existed, it may seem like those are skills that, you know,
01:45:51 ◼ ► that come from programming, but I think they are, like, ways of thinking that you bring to programming and that even if computers never existed,
01:45:58 ◼ ► you would still be thinking that way about, like, you know, tending the fields and, like, you know, the feudal era as a serf on a farm or something.
01:46:07 ◼ ► Fair enough. Benedict Beckman writes, "Given that the new 2018 iPad Pros are very likely incredibly fast and they 'only' have up to 6 gigs of RAM,
01:46:18 ◼ ► if any laptop that runs Mac OS had 6 gigs of RAM, we would laugh about it. So how is this possible? Why is so little RAM okay for an iOS device?
01:46:26 ◼ ► How much would you need to put into a Mac to get the same kind of, you know, performance and whatnot?"
01:46:32 ◼ ► So, I think we actually talked about this a lot, like, last week or the week before that. We were talking about, like, iOS getting swap.
01:46:39 ◼ ► I think much of that discussion holds. We're basically, like, iOS has been designed from day one and the entire software ecosystem has been designed from day one
01:46:51 ◼ ► to be very careful with how much memory it uses because the system has such a hard wall, like, if you try to take more than what is available to you, you just crash.
01:47:03 ◼ ► That's it. You crash hard. And so you have to be very careful in the way you develop things to minimize RAM usage.
01:47:10 ◼ ► Whereas on the Mac, that hasn't been the case for, like, 20 years. And so you can, so we have bloat. We have, you know, a combination of kind of just negligence and sloppiness.
01:47:22 ◼ ► But also we have features that are built on the assumption that you won't be constantly dumped out of RAM and you can, and you have lots of RAM to spare.
01:47:30 ◼ ► So you have things like in the Mac and PC world, you can have, like, a bunch of browser tabs open and you can switch between them and stuff and they don't usually, like, have to reload themselves because they've been in the background too long.
01:47:45 ◼ ► Safari does it a little bit, but for the most part, like, you know, other browsers mainly don't and even with Safari, like, once it's open, it tends to stay open for that boot session.
01:47:54 ◼ ► Whereas, like, on iOS, like, you know, you leave a web page for a while, you come back, it has to reload. Right? And there's all sorts of stuff like that where, like, all of iOS is designed to have memory just expunge at any moment, to have apps really sip it very carefully, and to have the OS manage it all very strictly for you as the user.
01:48:14 ◼ ► Whereas the desktop, we haven't had that environment any time recently, and so apps use as much RAM as they need to, they don't really pay much attention to it.
01:48:24 ◼ ► You as the user expect certain things to be the case, like, you expect your web pages to be there when you return to them, you expect the OS not to be terminating apps in the background without your knowledge.
01:48:33 ◼ ► So, the OS has just worked so differently, and the software is so different, that you can get away with a lot less on iOS, even considering that it's also sharing it with video, which is a whole separate thing.
01:48:45 ◼ ► Yeah, and if I could get the same result as a 6GB on an iOS device, I would say probably 16GB on a Mac.
01:48:56 ◼ ► Yeah, and you mentioned design, obviously the OS was designed for that reason, again, for reasons we discussed, but the key part is the second part, which is not design in the evolutionary sense, but it's like the fitness criteria.
01:49:06 ◼ ► The fitness criteria for applications on iOS has been survived within a RAM constrained environment.
01:49:16 ◼ ► If you don't, no one uses your app because it crashes all the time, right? That force has created the ecosystem of applications that we have now. It's not as if the programmers are better or more careful, they have no choice.
01:49:30 ◼ ► The environment is such that it's sink or swim. Either your app is going to die and not run and no one will ever do it, or you will figure out how to fit into this.
01:49:38 ◼ ► The hard unyielding ceiling has forced everyone to do that, so Apple came up with the design and everyone else is in an evolutionary environment where the only way you don't get eaten by the out of memory killer is figure out how to make it work.
01:49:55 ◼ ► The fitness criteria of a Mac application has been let people do powerful things with their computer. There has been no monster waiting around the corner to just instantly kill you.
01:50:05 ◼ ► Instead, the fitness criteria is do people like your application? Is it good? Does it let them open a million tabs? Because people want to do that.
01:50:15 ◼ ► If your browser suddenly quit, if you open too many tabs, people would move to one that didn't.
01:50:20 ◼ ► The forces at work in these two environments are so different that it's not surprising that it has produced two very different breeds of applications.
01:50:29 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Betterment, and Marine Layer. We'll see you next week.
01:50:35 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
01:50:48 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
01:50:58 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
01:51:37 ◼ ► I got some more questions about the iPad, now that you've got it sitting there in front of you. How is the one handed picking it up off the table modified by having the case on it, is it easier?
01:51:49 ◼ ► I actually thought of that exact same thing, because I was worried, is my thumb going to be on the screen? Normally the way, I almost always carry my smart keyboard and iPad 10.5 around, by basically I stick my hand, I stick my bottom three fingers of my hand into the triangle on the right side,
01:52:11 ◼ ► and put my index finger behind it and my thumb on the front of it, and pick it up like that. And you can still do that, and it turns out, at least on the 12.9, I can do that, and it's a little heavier obviously, but it's fine, it picks up just fine, it doesn't touch the screen, and the case still is amenable to that.
01:52:33 ◼ ► Yeah, it's pretty good about the rejection stuff, and plus you can turn it off when you carry it, but now what I mean, like laying flat on the table.
01:52:41 ◼ ► Oh, I see what you mean, so when it's closed, you're talking about picking up when it's closed.
01:52:57 ◼ ► With the smart case, yeah, the whole folio, with that on, yeah it's easier, because the folio, the side that has the keys is thicker than the side that doesn't, so if the thick part is down, then it's easier, because you have more space before the ridge happens.
01:53:15 ◼ ► Yeah, so it's easier if you store keys down, but either way, it's very hard to do one handed without the whole thing just sliding to the right direction.
01:53:28 ◼ ► I didn't have it on the list of questions, but you brought the kitchen scale to weigh the case, I would have put the thing flat on the table and said, "How am I supposed to pick this thing up one handed?"
01:53:38 ◼ ► You guys, it would have been a challenge, it would have been like Thor's hammer in the Avengers movie, everyone will gather around, everyone in this room is now going to try to pick this up with one hand, and we're all going to see how we do it, because I guess they can refuse to do it, but if they accept the challenge, there's some pressure for them to make it look like it's not that hard.
01:53:54 ◼ ► Of course, if they're going to use the Marko deflection technique, they would say, "Tell me, why do you want to pick it up with one hand?"
01:54:04 ◼ ► I'm absolutely going to try this in the Apple store, because I'm excited about the possibilities.
01:54:12 ◼ ► Where I store my iPad is sitting on top of its case, it has a pouch from my iPad, I brought a WC every year.
01:54:35 ◼ ► My iPad sits on top of it, and it is squishy, so even a flat iPad, because it's sitting on top of a squishy thing, I can dig my fingers into the squishy thing and pick it up.
01:54:44 ◼ ► I pick up my iPad one handed all the time, I'm pretty sure it's the only way I pick up my iPad.
01:55:05 ◼ ► Like, face down, naked, face down, 12.9-inch iPad, one hand pick up. This is the new Olympic event.
01:55:10 ◼ ► I would never store my iPad face down, because I would be worried about the screen getting scratched.
01:55:22 ◼ ► I have to slide it off the edge of the desk a little bit and then pick it up off the edge?
01:55:26 ◼ ► Yeah, that's cheating. Never mind that hurting it towards the edge of the desk is an incredibly dangerous thing to do with your $2,000 piece of glass.
01:55:33 ◼ ► I know. I'm going to try, at least face up, you have the camera bump. Hold on, let me see if that's better.
01:55:43 ◼ ► Go to the corner where the camera bump is, see if you can get your fingernails under there.
01:55:46 ◼ ► I could if it wasn't sliding. The whole iPad just slides across this because I tucked it.
01:55:53 ◼ ► The case solves the friction issue, but the bottom line is you're going to want this in a case.
01:56:00 ◼ ► To be fair, to make this scientific, go grab an iPad Pro or some other non-rectilinear iPad and put it in the same scenario.
01:56:23 ◼ ► Now Marco is furiously digging through the mountain of boxes that are in his office right now.
01:56:37 ◼ ► Alright, so, 10.5 is easy to pick up face down. It's super easy to face down with the case because there's a huge gap.
01:56:45 ◼ ► The case is kind of stepped. It has the thicker keyboard part and the thinner non-keyboard part.
01:57:25 ◼ ► But yeah, I would say if grabbing something off the table one-handed is a move that you do often with your iPad while it is closed, then by all means, maybe don't get this iPad.
01:57:36 ◼ ► Or while it's open if you have, I guess you don't have the non-keyboard case like whatever, like the regular Folio Smart thing.
01:57:47 ◼ ► Yeah, that's probably what I'm going to get. My office is concerned about your complaint about the keys being facing out the back, like if you were to flip the keyboard cover around. Does that feel as weird as you thought it would?
01:57:57 ◼ ► Let me see. Back to this. I'm going to juggle all these iPads for you, John. Let's see.
01:58:09 ◼ ► So when you flip it around, when you put the keyboard against the back of the iPad and just try to hold it like a regular caseless iPad but with the keyboard still attached, basically the keys are facing out on the top half of what you're holding.
01:58:22 ◼ ► So if you keep your hands low and you're only holding the bottom half, you don't really hit them.
01:58:28 ◼ ► Again, you're talking landscape, like a crazy person who uses their iPad in landscape all the time.
01:58:32 ◼ ► Yes, if you're holding it in portrait, if you're holding it pencil side to the right, then you're going to want to be holding the iPad with your left hand. That will avoid pushing the keys.
01:58:42 ◼ ► Well, since the orientation doesn't matter, you can just rotate it the other way. I mean, your Apple logo will be upside down, but you can't see that anyway.
01:58:50 ◼ ► Alright, we're going to go to the Apple store and check it out. The ability to rotate it so that whatever hand you're using to grip it is gripping the non-keyboard section of the thing seems like it could be good.
01:59:01 ◼ ► So John, remind me, you have not ordered anything as yet because you want to go to the Apple store as you just mentioned?
01:59:10 ◼ ► Yeah, MacBook Air. I told you I was going to get that. So I've ordered the new MacBook Air. What did I get? Specking it out was so painful. I have a bunch of stuff in the notes that I guess we'll talk about next week about the relative prices and power of the various products in Apple's lineup, at least the portable-ish ones.
01:59:28 ◼ ► But when specking it out, I don't want to pay a lot for this muffler and I don't want to pay a lot for a homework laptop. But I also don't want to buy something. I want this thing to last a long time. I want this to be the last homework laptop I ever have to buy for at least one of my kids.
01:59:49 ◼ ► He's a freshman in high school. He can go through four years of high school with this laptop will be fine because all they're using is Google Docs. I'm like, "Why can't you just use it on your iPad?" They're like, "Nnnngh." They make a groaning noise.
01:59:59 ◼ ► Anyway, I don't want to buy a new laptop so I don't want to get it with the minimum, minimum specs. And the minimum specs are low. Like 128 gig SSD is not like the default one or the lowest one.
02:00:11 ◼ ► That's not enough to do anything. Both of these kids have devices they take photos on and both of them have enough photos that they're both going to have accounts on this thing. And if they both allow their photos things to run and even if they put "optimized storage" they're going to fill the disk with their photos.
02:00:27 ◼ ► Don't let them bring the photos on. The thing is for school assignments these days they need photos. They take photos. The school assignment is like get a photo of your family and do it. They're going to need their photo collections on there. So they're going to have photos on there. This is what I'm thinking about.
02:00:43 ◼ ► So I had to up the SSD but I'm not going to pay for a 1.5 terabyte SSD. Now it's like expensive as a MacBook Pro. So all I could do was 512 which is like too much money because Apple charged his arm and leg for the charge but I could not buy this thing with 128.
02:00:59 ◼ ► So I got a 512 gig SSD which I felt like is going to be tight for two kids with photos. But it's enough that I feel like we'll get by and maybe Apple will actually improve its optimized storage thing in photos someday and not have it eat all my disk space.
02:01:14 ◼ ► And then for RAM I had to get 16 because from my experience having these two kids log into my wife's iMac which also has 16 gigs of RAM you get three people logging in, four people, 16 gigs, it starts to get stressed, two people. It can handle it. Eight is too little.
02:01:31 ◼ ► So I got 16 gigs, 512 and those are basically the only choices you have because you don't get to pick CPU or anything like that. And I got AppleCare because again my children have destroyed the 2011 MacBook Air that they had eventually totally killing it.
02:01:45 ◼ ► So I need all the help I can get in terms of keeping this thing alive. The idea of it being dropped down the stairs is not fantastical or being stepped on.
02:01:56 ◼ ► I'm going to become one of those dads who's reminding them exactly how much money the thing they're doing homework on costs. Please don't break it.
02:02:04 ◼ ► Because all the hand-me-down iPads, like whatever, we knew they were going to destroy them and they do.
02:02:10 ◼ ► My son just asked for a new smart cover for Christmas because he destroyed the smart cover on his iPad. How can you destroy the smart cover? What is there to destroy? He found a way. It looks like it's been chewed by dogs.
02:02:21 ◼ ► It's disintegrated. It's the same age. I think it's newer than the smart covers on the adults iPads but somehow I don't know what he does to it. Anyway, they destroyed the 2011 MacBook Air.
02:02:34 ◼ ► But that was a hand-me-down computer. It's like what do you expect? The whole point is you hand down the older devices to your kids and they destroy them.